In his last days he became a different person. Lots of people say this, and they mean their bitch of a mother started paying attention to them, or their husband, his brain honeycombed with tumors, forgot their name. But my father, a lifelong painter, music lover, and general bohemian, became obsessed with shipping lanes.

He made us buy him enormous maps, coded with the ocean currents and the borders of national jurisdictions. He marked them up with complicated notations — at first we thought his mind was gone, but it became clear he had a large body of specialized knowledge. He began talking to a professor of trade economics on the telephone. He visited the hospital. My father had apparently developed a new system to increase route efficiency by 20%.

My brother thought all this was fascinating. He thought it was wonderful that, at the end of his life, our father was showing us a side we had never seen. But I felt cut adrift. After all my years of struggling to meet my father’s increasingly mercurial and unrealistic expectations, I was not prepared to mourn so practical a man.

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