“DON’ T LET ME die in the hospital,” my father whispered as the paramedics carried him past me on a stretcher following the heart attack that had struck him down as he dined alone at the kitchen table. A steak, rare, with mustard and a salad containing fresh watercress. The piece of gorgonzola he’d planned to have for dessert with cherry jam was standing on the sideboard.

More and more often my father would eat alone in the kitchen. My mother had long since given up even liking him, but at seventy she was too tired to leave. My father still loved her, after all this time, throughout their fifty years together. He loved the doors and walls that separated them from each other in their home because he knew that she was in the next room, on the other side of the wallpaper and the thick, muggy silence. That was enough for him, and the affection with which he gazed at the walls behind which she sat, somewhere, never failed to break my heart.

Following his panicked call—“Eddie, my girl, I think something bad is happening to me”—I made it back from my publishing house almost at the same time as the paramedics arrived, and as I held his strong, rough, increasingly dry hand all the way from the kitchen table to the ambulance’s wide-open doors, he begged me not to let him die in the hospital. I promised him that I wouldn’t.

I followed the ambulance to the hospital on my motorbike and then tailed the ambulance men all the way into the green-tiled casualty department with its aluminum doors. I ignored the doctor, whose job was to pummel hearts back to life with his electric-shock machine and his pride, as he tried to prevent me from entering this cramped corridor of misery, fatigue, and human suffering. I ignored him as he tried to explain to me that other rules applied at the end of a person’s life than during it, that love no longer had anything to do with it, only adrenaline and oxygen, and that I’d get in the doctors’ way.