There had been an uneasy truce in our house after he was hospitalized a second time, only six months after his first, just a few months after our family trip to the desert. The first time he had been hospitalized had just seemed like bad luck, though years of hard drinking often have an inevitable end. No one would believe that he of all people could drink himself to death so quickly. It was an admirable attempt, but it did not stick. He had lost forty pounds in a matter of weeks. And that’s when my mother and I learned the functions of organs we had never had to think of before. I could not recognize him. He was not just thinner but older. No longer the fierce antagonist in my life, he was just an old man, even if he wasn’t quite yet. He was in the hospital long enough to detox, but it didn’t last.

He said he was going to sip slowly, thinking it was the tenacity with which he drank that nearly did him in, not the quantity.

A few weeks after his first hospital discharge, we sat outside in the dark watching a soundless lightning storm together, the kind that rolls into Western towns quickly to cause a ruckus before blowing out just as quickly—flat land as far as you can see, and no mountains to stop it. My mother was scared of the storm and had gone inside, but my father and I prided ourselves for being brave against God’s elements.

Every few beats the clouds above us lit up white and we could feel the electricity in the air. We loved watching the lightning skip horizontally from cloud to cloud. I tried not to look at his quiet sips, just like I tried not to hear the opening of each can. I concentrated on my own drink instead, the glass crowding with beaded sweat. I knew the bad thing—yet another hospitalization, or worse—was on the horizon, and it didn’t need to be said. But I did.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

“What?” he said, though I was sure he knew what I was talking about.

“Drinking again.”

He was quiet for a while, really thinking about it.

“I want to die first,” he said.

I couldn’t see his face and he couldn’t see mine, but if he had he would have seen that he had knocked the wind out of me.

“What do you mean?” I asked, barely able to contain my rage.

He nodded toward the house—to the living room, where my mother sat watching TV—and said, “I want to die before her.”

It was so simple, his announcement of his death plan, and carefully thought out, too. It was so obvious that it hadn’t even occurred to me.

“I can’t tell her, but I can tell you, because you can take it,” he said.