I’m home now but Tuesday, I was still at Dad’s and Darla’s house in Virginia. The day was warm and sunlit. Because I was Phone Monitor and fending off callers of all types, I’d accumulated techno-debris. Moving from place to place became complicated. So I held still in the sun and typed smutty email to a handsome man, which was just funny.

At some point, I looked up the driveway and saw something odd through the trees. The mooing of cows in the pasture in front of me took on a peculiar nagging quality. I called to Darla, working on her laptop on the living room floor.

Tata: Hey Darla, want to see something weird?
Darla: Always. Whatcha got?
Tata: Um, are those cows outside the lines?

Indeed, I would’ve freaked about then but a week before, Daria had found a cow loitering on the driveway, so of course she called her husband in New Jersey.

Daria: Tyler, there’s a cow on the driveway. What do I do?
Tyler: What’s it doing?
Daria: Chewing. I can’t get home.
Tyler: The cow is between you and the house?
Daria: Yah huh!
Tyler: It’s not going to hurt you. It’s a cow.

Daria edged the van closer and the cow ignored her. She inched closer still. The cow slipped under the barbed wire and disappeared through the trees, leaving those of us unaccustomed to ways most bovine with the impression that a random cow in the driveway has got places to go and cud to chew. Darla, who lives in the house surrounded by cow pastures and paths, was not interested in cows outside the lines and returned to her laptop. I was sure, however, something was up, and up something was. Within a few minutes, a sizable number of cows stood at an intersection in the driveway. And then they started walking toward me.

Tata: Hey, Darla! The cows are coming.
Darla: I’ll get a camera.

The driveway’s long and winding and parts are obscured from view by trees. Plainly visible from our vantage point on the front steps were the calves. As the cows walked down the driveway toward the house, calves and cows inside the barbed wire and electric fence walked along, mooing madly, because cows tell on one another. Oh yes, they absolutely do. And cows don’t just have arguments – which they do – they know their voices attract the attention of attendant humans, so when there’s a lot of mooing, someone will show up with a flatbed.

Tuesday afternoon, cows headed for the house and I was entirely amused until they crossed the PVC bridge supposed to deter them from coming over for picnic lunches. Cows don’t like unstable surfaces so the pipe bridge should make them turn around but these cows were especially clever and walked around it.

My jobs at the house as Dad lay dying were Cat Wrangler (in charge of keeping cats happy, fed and out of Dad’s hair) and Phone Monitor (keeping interlopers from interloping) and I figured This here is the intersection between pet care and border patrol. Rock on. So with Darla snapping away behind me, I got up and walked toward the cows without the first clue what might happen.

Cheese it! It’s the cops!

Turns out cows are scared of Jersey chicks. I came around the trees and said, “Hey gals, whatcha doin’?” Nine giant animals that could have crushed my skull with one hoof spun around and skedaddled up the driveway. That was a surprise. When I stood up, I had no idea the girl gang would go without a rumble. I’m going to add Cowgirl to my resume.

I’m purty.

During the month we ran a household and cared for Daddy, Darla, Daria and I didn’t always get a shower every day. We reported this to Dad.

Daria: We have a game called I Am the Cleanest Of the House.
Dara: I shower before school every day so I am always The First Cleanest.
Daria: Right now, I Am the Cleanest Of the House but yesterday –
Tata: I was the Cleanest Of the House until Darla showered.
Dad: I’m out of this game, right?
Daria: And you smell fine.
Tata: I, however, cannot bear to smell me and must fix that immediately. I will shower two days in a row! I’m mad, mad with cleaning power!
Daria: She’s going to be a bitch about this until someone else gets the title.

Obviously, that wasn’t Tuesday, since I chased cows up the driveway in pajamas. An exciting footnote: to the right of me is the spot where I first saw cows outside the lines, and I hoped they’d slide through the fence. Instead, all nine cows turned left and went up the neighbors’ driveway. So. When the neighbors came home, they found cows on the lawn.

Oops.

When the undertaker arrives, I’m pouring chicken stock into a saucepan and tossing in rehydrated shitake mushrooms, a bay leaf, dried sage. When I return to the living room, Dad has been dead three hours. Darla hasn’t budged from her spot, bedside, where she caresses his right arm. Her parents have assumed protective positions between the undertaker and the front door, which interests me since I assume we should be clearing that path. I say nothing and sit on the bed at Dad’s left hand. His skin is cool to the touch but still soft. I am also interested because the undertaker is a young, nervous blond boy in a brand new suit, and he is shaped like a question mark.

Kid: Hi um um um my name is Randy um um um I’m with –
Tata: We spoke on the phone. My name is Domenica.
Kid: Yes um um um I’m very sorry for your um um um loss.
Tata: Thank you. Please sit down. Would you like a glass of water? Would you like to use the bathroom?
Kid: No, thank you. Um um um I have a few um um um questions –
Darla: GET ON WITH IT!
Kid: Yes, um um um we’d like to assure you we’ll um um um take care of everything, including um um um getting enough death certificates for your needs. Do you know how many you’d want?

We look at each other.

Tata: How many do people generally ask for, Randy?
Kid: Five or six, and we can always get more.
Tata: We’d like seven. Dad has a minor child who will certainly need copies.
Kid: And we can always get more.
Tata: Excellent.
Kid: Do either of you know your father’s parents’ names?
Darla: He’s my husband!
Tata: …and my father, and his father’s name was Alessandro. A-L-E-S-S-A-N-D-R-O. His mother’s name was Edith SicilianName LongItalianLastName. I’ll write down his children’s names for you.
Kid: Thanks. Um um um about the medical examiner –
Darla: What about him?
Kid: We’ll um um um speak to him for you.
Tata: Thank you, since we’re not sure what we’d be discussing. Which can be so awkward.
Kid: Oh, I’m sorry I’m wearing a pink shirt.
Darla: What?!
Tata: Dahhhhhhlink, we thought it was just fashion-forward for morticians.
Kid: I went to a breast cancer um um um funeral this morning and um um um –
Darla: Why are you apologizing? Why is he apologizing?
Kid: Anyway, I do apologize –
Tata: Randy, dear, did you come here alone?
Kid: Actually, my associate is waiting in the um um um vehicle. Why do you ask?
Tata: Because otherwise you and I were going to carry Daddy to the hearse.
Darla: I wondered if you were going to throw Dominic over one shoulder.
Tata: I’d do that just for you, sweetie.

Randy slips outside and I duck back in the kitchen to add more chicken stock to the pot, to lay out plates and flatware. Milk and instant potatoes wait for me in measuring cups. Butter softens on a plate. I’d opened a box of expensive frozen burgers, which someone will explain later to be a concession to the sewage taste cancer left in Dad’s mouth. Canned vegetables wait in plastic containers to be microwaved. In the living room, the kid and an older man prepare to move the body. I kiss his cheek, say, “Goodbye, Daddy,” and march back to the kitchen, where frying pans heat, ingredients simmer and the microwave whirs. The front door slams and what we’ve all dreaded happens: Darla collapses in her mother’s arms and sobs for her lost husband. I sob. Nigel sobs. Nina sobs. We all sob. Years-long minutes pass. Darla hiccoughs.

Darla: What’s for dinner?

We dry our tears. We eat burgers with pepper relish because three of us were born in England and it happens to be tasty, and mashed potatoes, creamed corn and cut green beans. Our new motto becomes: You have to laugh or you’ll cry, but you still gotta eat, and we ate that kid in a pink shirt for breakfast.

When I left a month ago, it was winter. This evening, I walked to the family store in a light spring rain. My friends filled my refrigerator with fresh vegetables and light Lebanese food. My new couch is gorgeous. My apartment smells like sachets and air fresheners I like. After a month of almost no television, RAI news is on in Italian in my living room. I cannot get used to speaking above a whisper.

Finally, I have come home.

Monday morning:

Daria: How’s your hangover?
Tata: Why are you screaming?
Daria: I’m whispering. You’re hungover.
Tata: How could you possibly know that?
Daria: Because the sounds of my little children’s tiny steps on my kitchen floor feels like roofing nails being pounded into my brain.
Tata: Anya told me everyone wound up at Auntie InExcelsisDeo’s last night. I thought she was sobbing but she said “I’m so allergic to InExcelsisDeo’s dog I could plotz.”
Daria: Anyway, I don’t have to be there to know that when I might’ve been a teeny bit intoxicated you were a dirty drunk and so was Darla.
Tata: No such thing. We have Get Out Of Jail Free cards. We could run naked through city hall shrieking Rod McKuen poems and not get arrested because we’re the grieving family of Dominic LongItalianLastName.
Daria: Wait, so I was a dirty drunk and you were afflicted family members?
Tata: Yup.
Daria: I need a better zip code.

On Saturday, Darla asked me to write Dad’s obituary and I admit to panicking a bit. Darla found a recent bio for some festival Dad was planning when he got sick. I stared at it, then called Daria for help. Dad has led a complicated, sometimes secretive life the details of which remain obscure. After many fits and starts, I tore bits and pieces out of the folksy bio and added a list of surviving relatives. Then I looked across the kitchen table and found the solution to my what-am-I-omitting? problem.

Tata: Summer, read this and tell me what I’m forgetting. Please!

Dad’s second ex-wife and my baby sister Dara’s mother Summer put down an elderly copy of People and stared at the text file. First of all, everybody who wandered by said the same thing.

Mourner: He didn’t write his own obituary?
Tata: Nope.
Mourner: …I didn’t see that coming!

Summer, like the rest of us, couldn’t believe Dad hadn’t scripted his demise and screened sponsors. He was a prowling, growling set of uncompromising standards for himself and others and this cancer thing was unacceptable, so when he told Darla he hadn’t written an obituary, even she didn’t believe him. There’s a magnet on his wonky oven that reads: CULINARY CONTROL FREAK. Naturally, we searched his computer for tributes he’d written to himself. We braced ourselves to read posthumous revelations like Now it can be told: Dominic LongItalianLastName invented pantyhose in 1958 so he’d have something to peel off women in 1959, but he was true to his word and we found nothing. Summer read an obituary draft rough as a gravel footpath and asked, “What about his bonsais? Remember when he was a professional musician? Didn’t he take pictures for a living? How many countries did he visit? Did he make that Olympic team?” Christ, if I knew. I wrote it all down, rearranged it, and emailed a draft to Darla, who was, of course, in the living room with Dad. Then, I added something, and emailed a revision to Darla, still only thirty feet away. Darla rewrote the crappy draft I’d sent her in a competent manner and sent it back to me, in the kitchen. The timestamp says 4:12 p.m. She hit send, she said later, and turned to see why Dad made a funny noise, which turned out to be a last breath, then no more. As I mentioned before, Darla’s father Nigel told his wife Nina Dad was dead. She came to the kitchen table where Summer, Dara and I waited and said, “I’m sorry but he’s gone.” Summer and Dara burst into tears. I stood up, walked around the table like an apparition and into the living room. I saw that Daddy was dead, that Darla was sobbing, that Nigel was distraught because his daughter was distraught, and I pulled the list of phone numbers off the wall. I said, “I will take care of this,” and walked back to the phone, where I called hospice and got the answering service. It was Sunday, after all. An insufficiently understanding operator spelled and re-spelled LongItalianLastName five or six times, though it should have been clear to her that the person leaving this message had just lost a significant figure in her life. Someone was supposed to call back immediately. Fifteen minutes later, no one had, I called back and made it entirely clear I was reporting a death and delays were – say it with me, children – unacceptable. At just about 5:20, a very sweet on-call nurse arrived, checked Dad’s pulse and respiration and smiled at us. She had no legal power to say the words, “He’s dead” and since I knew that, I’d already called the funeral home and said, “Dudes, it’s happened. Stand by for a hospice nurse to call you.” She called, over and over, for an on-call oncologist to pronounce Dad dead. In the meantime, sobbing at the kitchen table had given way to frustration with procedure and staring into space when the nurse sat down with us. I couldn’t move this process forward without taking a hostage, so I changed the subject for my teenaged sister.

Tata: So: thanks for leaving me that load of laundry.
Dara: …no problem…
Tata: I’ll tell you what I said this morning: “That’s enough! Those bitches are going to fold their own thongs!”

Summer and the nurse burst out laughing. Dara stared at me for a second, then snickered.

Dara: Nobody folds their thongs. What, do you fold your underwear?
Tata: Of course not. I solve that problem by not wearing any.

The spell of the last months is broken when mourners and the hospice nurse can’t stop themselves from doubling over. I don’t know what possessed me to say this but I should be checked for ectoplasmic fingerprints.

Tata: Listen, there’s no reason for you to stay here any longer. Why don’t you go home with your mom?
Dara: Daria will come back tomorrow, right?
Tata: Right, and you can have the cuddly sister then but in the meantime, why not go home?
Dara: I guess I could…

She ran upstairs to pack while Summer looked at me like What just happened?

Dara ran back downstairs with her backpack just as the nurse got a doctor on the phone. The formality of pronouncing Dad dead occurred two hours after his last breath, and then the mortuary people could leave their office an hour away. Dara kissed Daddy goodbye and I walked her and Summer to their car.

Dara: Hug me!
Tata: I…just…can’t!
Dara: You’re prickly but you’re gonna get over it.
Tata: I’m prickly, but you’re all trippy and fall-downy. Talk to you tomorrow.

When the vehicle from the mortuary arrived in the driveway, dinner was ten minutes’ from ready, by which I mean everything on the stove bubbled gently. We have been eating where he slept, but I worried it might be too much for the undertakers to arrive and find us passing the gravy, especially since there was no way Darla would leave Dad’s body. So. Again, we waited.

Dad stopped breathing a little over half an hour ago. We’re waiting for the hospice people to come and begin the legal aspects of the end of Dad’s life.

If we can choose the manner of our deaths, and some of us do, we are lucky indeed. He was asleep. Darla and her father were sitting bedside, talking quietly. He was breathing, then he didn’t draw another breath. Then, Darla’s father called to his wife, and we in the kitchen clearly heard him whisper, “He’s gone.” Everyone sobbed and I called hospice. Once again, we are just waiting.

We had a very hard night. Even the cats are restless.

I’m so tired.