Dad was on his way out. This we knew. My brother Chris and I had been alternating in shifts at the hospital, and I was back at my parents’ house when he sent a text we’d all been expecting: You should come in now.

I called a taxi, and it showed up faster than a taxi had ever shown up in the history of taxis, and I explained the situation to the driver, and he really stiffened in his seat and rose to the occasion, or at least his right foot did, all business, autobahnning it up Route 2 to Storrow Drive along the Charles River and up to Mass General in a matter of…it was minutes, the fastest I’d ever gotten to that part of town in my life. I jumped out while the car was still basically moving and then push push pushed at the elevator button and up to the ninth floor, where we had all spent most of the last couple of weeks. I rushed past the lobby with the old magazines I’d read cover to cover and around the corner desk area where the nurses sat and toward my father’s room at the end of the corridor. My mom was on the phone to her sister, and Chris was at Dad’s bedside and my dad was…

Well, Dad was dead.

He’d been dead for some time, my brother said. Maybe a half hour.

“But fifteen minutes ago you texted, ‘You should come in now,’ ” I said.

“Right,” he said.

“And he was dead?”

“Yes.”

“I think ‘You should come in now’ means you should come in now because Dad is about to die,” I said. “Not ‘You should come in now because Dad is dead.’ ”

“What difference does it make?”

“ ‘You should come in now’ means still alive.”

“ ‘Come in now’ means come in now. What: am I supposed to tell you to stay home?”

“ ‘Come in now’ means hanging by a thread, like there’s still time.”

“Hmmm. I am not sure about that.”

We sounded like Jerry and George bickering in the kitchen on Seinfeld.

Meanwhile there was Dad, poor Dad, ravaged, pale, gone, tucked hard into the bed. The truth was he’d slipped away quietly, before Chris or my mom had much of a chance to notice. There had been no drama, no final words, no last-second revelation of a stash of gold buried underneath the garage. Nurses and doctors had come by for hugs and quiet conversations, but all it felt like was the inevitable, which is what it had felt like for a while.

When you lose a loved one, they say it doesn’t hit you immediately but sneaks up on you quietly, at a distance. In the days and weeks and months after Dad died, I kept waiting for it to sneak up. I got through his funeral fine—eight-minute eulogy, packed church, Mom in the front row, got some laughs, didn’t cry. I didn’t cry at the party afterward or on the drive home or even during a final look into his closet, the rows of cotton sweatshirts labeled Coach. I wore one of his old gray sweatshirts around for months. Nothing.

Father and son is a complicated relationship, certainly by nature, probably by design—so much is given and expected, to the point that it’s hard to live up to any of it. The relationship is almost all emotion—no professional distance, little perspective. My dad, like almost every dad, had his episodes as mentor, adversary, advocate, and tyrant. He could be thoughtful and tender but also fly off the handle unnecessarily, cartoonishly, freak out when freaking out was not the right thing. I spent way too much time being ungrateful and mad. We argued into my adulthood. As I got older, it got better. Parenthood softened me; grandparenthood softened him. Plus he was good at it—a full-on, babbling, googly-woogly granddad, sticking a tennis racket in Jesse’s hand before he could crawl, showing Jesse the same summer constellations he showed me when I was Jesse’s age. Nothing makes you love a parent more than seeing their love for your own kid.

His goodbye had been so quick. Less than six months, when it was all said and done, March to August. It had been too fast to engineer an ideal exit. Before he’d gotten sick, I’d been developing a semi–bucket list for him, Things I Wanted to Do with Dad Before He Croaked, and it included the golf Masters and Wimbledon in England. I’d already begun to offer, and he’d declined. We had time. Maybe next year. In April, right after he was diagnosed, I made a final push for the Masters. One morning I was talking to some scalpers outside Augusta National Golf Club, and I called Dad right then, told him I’d priced it out, I’d take care of it, just get on the plane, he just had to see this once. I hoped he’d say to hell with it and get on a plane. He could not. He did not.

This is the part where I beg: don’t wait.

His daily life narrowed to modest accomplishments. That summertime trip to the restaurant with my mother. A walk around the block. A conversation with his grandkids. Everything about his grandkids. He found time to dote on Bessie, who was pregnant with Josie, a grandkid he’d never meet. There were mornings that he was animated enough to become angry about the Red Sox. The ability to be mad about something meaningless made him happy.

A couple nights before Dad died, Chris had his daughter, Blue, and Blue’s mom, Violaine, up to visit the hospital, and at some point I suggested they try to get Red Sox tickets. Blue had never gone to Fenway Park. I was adamant: Aww, ya gotta take the kid to Fenway! Somehow Chris managed to wrangle primo tickets right next to the Boston dugout. That night I turned on the game in Dad’s hospital room, and we discovered that every time the TV cameras flashed to a left-handed batter—Hey, it’s Big Papi!—you could see Chris, Blue, and Vio sitting there on the baseline, huddled like penguins. Dad was so medicated I wouldn’t have blamed him if he thought he was hallucinating. But he noticed, and it made him smile.

Later in the evening he asked me to help him adjust his bed. I have been in plenty of hospitals, and I have never been able to figure out the beds. They have dashboards that look like those in Russian space shuttles, and it is a law of the universe that you must fling the controls in three different incorrect directions before you finally get where you are going to go. Dad wanted to sit up a little bit, and I went over to the left side of the bed, leaned over, and pressed…aw, crap, wrong button.

“NOOOOOOO!” he howled, furiously fixing me in the eyes. “WHAT ARE YOU? THE FUUUUU—”

He so clearly was about to say “The fuck are you doing?” but he held up, maybe out of politeness but probably out of exhaustion. He just looked at me. I felt like I was back taking my driver’s test at sixteen, when the state driving examiner announced that he was passing me even though I missed a few turns and my dad, sitting in the back seat, tried to argue that he should flunk me.

Dad’s yelling didn’t make me upset. It thrilled me. It was a signal of life. I found the proper button, and the bed whizzed and hummed, and he sank back down to prone level.

It would be our last interaction. The next day Dad drifted in and out of consciousness. He managed to say some nice things about my mother—sweet and grateful things she deserved, after all she’d done to help him—but mostly he was out of it. At one point he looked close to slipping away and I asked if he was seeing anything. Light, gates, heavenly anything? A Dunkin’ Donuts in the sky! Borg-McEnroe 1980! He’d loved to fish—did he see a striped bass run in Montauk?

“What are you doing?” Chris asked me.

“You never really know!” I said.

My brother rolled his eyes. “You’re insane,” he said.

The next morning Dad was gone.

A month later I wondered if I was ever going to feel it. People came up to me and said nice things about my father, and I appreciated all of it, from his students and his tennis players and his colleagues at school. But it didn’t break me down. I wrote a tribute to him in the Journal and I approached it as if I were writing about somebody I wasn’t related to, interviewing his former students and players, trying to render a realistic person.

Months passed. For a few winters, I’d been playing in a goofy indoor adult tennis league near my house with a bunch of other flabby hackers who thought they were still reasonably good at the game. I had developed a ritual of calling my father from the car on the way home for a postmatch assessment—I’d give him the score, tell him how it had gone, describe my opponent’s style, and analyze my approach. Even if the match ended late at night, he’d stay up back in Massachusetts, waiting for the call.

These were some of my favorite conversations I ever had with my dad. We talked about successes and mistakes, the lessons I’d learned, the things I’d do differently the next time. They were not big things. Small steps. Marginal improvements.

That December I played my first league match, and I got thumped, really thumped, the kind of loss that makes you want to take your tennis racket and puree it in a blender. I had no answers for the kind of player I usually beat easily, and the whole match was over a lot sooner than it should have been. It was around 11:00 P.M. as I got to the car, and when I sat inside and turned it on, I reached for the button on the dashboard. It was time to call Dad. His number popped up on the screen, and the phone began to dial.

I’d forgotten.

And I hung up the call and began to cry, and I cried for a really long time, in a way that felt like I could begin to move forward.

I’m going to make so many mistakes, but I know it is okay. I’ll take the small steps. Marginal improvements.

Little victories.