"I was getting ready to leave when Daniel burst into the room. He put a hand on each side of my face and told me Dad was gone. From another room, I heard the unnerving sounds of my mother wailing. I'd heard something like that before, when farmers separated the young sheep from their mothers and days of suffering followed."
"I didn't budge. I patted Daniel [half brother] on the shoulder and thanked him. I was determined not to cry. Crying was for the weak, I thought. It was indulgent. That's what I'd been told, all those years before, when my best friend Emil's father had died. Now I felt I'd been weak for too long and would never again show the world a single tear."
"Dad was waked in the gallery he never got to paint in, his paintbrushes on a cart in the corner of the room, where they remain today. I remember feeling numb as I looked down at him in the light beechwood coffin we'd selected at the undertakers. It was the same colour as the gallery's Escher-esque parquet flooring. The undertaker had dressed him in a smart navy blue suit that was too big for him,"
A sudden notification of a father's death arrives amid shock and a mother's wailing. The narrator restrains visible emotion, recalling taught stoicism and past losses that shaped that impulse. A half brother, Daniel, delivers the news and receives gratitude at the moment of impact. The father is waked in an unfinished gallery, with paintbrushes left on a cart as relics of an unfulfilled project. The coffin and parquet flooring mirror each other in tone, and the undertaker dresses the father in a suit too large, underscoring both dignity and absence.
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