Dad died in his chair, reading a fishing magazine and eating bread with sugarless coffee at 7:19 a.m.

It was a silent death. His heart simply shut down. No chance for gestures of spiritual wisdom or final words.

Mom screamed when she saw him sitting there with his mouth open, the coffee spilled across his body, the magazine and cup on the floor. His arms hung awkwardly at his sides, his back arched slightly to the right.

To Pedro, my older brother, it was a painful, absurd, unforgettable image. And when Mom cried out in despair, “Dad is dead!”

Pedro already had his Nikon out, pointing it at Dad. Pedro didn’t cry.

“Just one tear,” he said years later.

Because Dad was gone. And letting him go wasn’t easy …

Mom didn’t dare touch him, too shaken to call the hospital or a neighbor.

I cried, I was a child, staring at my first corpse. There was nothing else I could do.

Pedro kept taking pictures, contemplating him. To Pedro, Dad was a “Figure of hypocrisy.” He studied art and philosophy, drifting into words I couldn’t understand.

It was Mom’s idea … I remember it clearly.

To keep Dad sitting there and go on with our lives as if he were still with us. It sounded strange.

Pedro agreed, saying he’d call his girlfriend Carla and his university friends to start an artistic study on the relationship between soul and body beyond the earthly plane, before the final breath. “The aesthetics of death,” or something like that.

Mom … Mom simply carried on her routine through tears, speaking aloud to Dad as if he could answer.

Pedro’s friends came over, and one suggested it would be visually striking to expose the body to the neighborhood, to the city.

“You’re crazy. We don’t want the press,” Pedro said. Thankfully, he was reasonable.

But his friends wanted a spectacle, a new perspective on Dad’s death.

They convinced Mom to keep Dad’s place intact, his position, his objects.

With her phone, one of Pedro’s friends filmed Dad, describing him as the modern man, the new Prometheus of Recreo. She said Dad was the mirror in which masculinity could reflect itself. His bald head, his fat belly with gray hair. His unbuttoned shirt, his summer breakfast. The gesture of his mouth was the opening of unsaid words. Pedro and his friends stayed silent while that girl shredded Dad’s memory without ever knowing him.

Dad was a good man, gray … sometimes furious, hitting Mom and then going to a bar to get drunk. Other times we played soccer and ate at McDonald’s. It wouldn’t be fair to preach morality. I’m not the best of men. My wife cheats on me with my best friend. My children have fled the nest. Am I a drunk? I don’t know.

But Pedro’s friend said Dad was the flesh statue of the Baby Boomer generation.

When she turned off the camera, they decided to present it as an experimental short documentary at the local film festival. Carla, Pedro’s girlfriend, would edit it with layer upon layer of punk-style filters.

Mom cooked pasta for lunch.

We ate with Dad dead at the head of the table.

Pedro’s friends made horrible, graceless jokes. They were so insensitive. Mom was offended but deeply resigned. You could see it in her eyes.

She would never touch a dead man, and I suspect she never touched him much when he was alive. She didn’t want Dad to leave the house and vanish forever.

Pedro’s friends left at sunset.

He stayed in his room with his girlfriend. They had sex.

Mom called her friends, pretending everything was fine.

And me … I just needed Dad to move again, to tell me, “You’re a foolish kid.”

But that never happened …

I think Mom couldn’t bear it. Maybe she searched online for how long the dead can remain before they start to smell. I think her vision of herself as wife and widow shifted when, after dinner, men in white arrived and carried Dad away on a stretcher. I heard them say to Mom:

“Luisa. Tell me you didn’t do this.”

But Mom, ashamed, didn’t answer.

The next morning, the fishing magazine was still on the floor. The coffee cup, the bread, the crumbs. Everything intact.

Mom hugged Pedro, then hugged me, and said:

“This will be our sanctuary.”

And we began eating and watching TV with Dad’s place as sacred ground.

No one could sit in Dad’s chair, no one could pick up the fishing magazine, eat the bread, or clean the spilled coffee.

Mom wasn’t religious. I don’t know why she did it.

Pedro enjoyed the conceptual aspect of it all.

His friends were invited to secret ceremonies where they read beatnik poetry and spoke in circles at the table. Mom liked Dad being remembered that way.

I didn’t …

I didn’t think much at all.

In my mind and heart, Dad was dead, and none of us had learned anything from him. Before sleep, I hoped Dad would appear as a ghost. But no …

Ghosts don’t exist.

Those days are anchored in my memory. Why did we do what we did so naturally? Time flew in a blink. Maybe my schoolwork, Pedro’s nightly parties, or Mom’s invisible madness. Time flew …

And two weeks later, Mom invited a man to the house. Laughing, she explained what had happened in our family. She seemed happy.

The man sat in Dad’s chair.

Mom leaned toward him, looked at him, looked at me, and kissed him on the lips.

My eyes opened wide …

She cleaned the coffee, threw the bread in the trash, and put away the fishing magazine.

The man told me Mom was an adorable woman.

I never saw him again.

And life …

Life makes no sense.