We all believed it, my mother and sisters and I, that my father clung to his last heartbeats and breaths until Steven could arrive to bid farewell.  We enthusiastically expressed our belief to Steven and to each other.  Whether factual or no, we wanted to believe it; we wanted this mystic affirmation of a narrow sliver of hope in the midst of death.  Indeed, that Steven arrived before his father’s death seemed miraculous, despite the coma and death rattle.  But I soon discerned the unfairness to Steven of this testimony, which required of him wonder and faith in the face of haggard death, which broached the unanswerable question of why our father’s lucidity could not have been prolonged a mere 36 hours to allow a two-way farewell, which raised the painful reality of this last good-bye.  So, I kept my belief, or my wanting to belief, silent, and sought merely to accept the circumstances we were given and to find satisfaction in having done our best with them.  Steven’s trip was planned months before, but he arrived just prior to our father’s passing and left just following the funeral.  After our father’s passing and our family prayer, when our small assemblage felt ready, I called the on-call hospice nurse, Monica, to report the death: Tuesday January 14 at 11:03 p.m.  The official time of death, however, became the time of her certification of death: Wednesday January 15 at 00:26 a.m.  She performed her coroner’s functions, wasted the remaining morphine (mixing with dish detergent and pouring down the sink drain), and called the funeral home.  At about 2 a.m., the mortician rang the doorbell, bowed at the waste, expressed his condolences for our loss, entered the house, crossed the room to our mother, and delivered to her a very-long-stemmed red rose, bowing again and whispering again his condolences, which he repeated at a higher volume after Mom said, “What’s that?”  After speaking comforts, he and his junior associate, dressed in black suits and burgundy bow ties, shrouded our father in white and transferred him to a wheeled gurney, where they enclosed our father’s body in a blue velvet bag with a sturdy brass zipper, and draped the whole with a blue patchwork quilt, a nice touch I did not anticipate but appreciated.  And then they rolled our father’s body away and out the front door and down my wood ramps and into their Larkin van.