Wake-up Call

  I woke up in a rush, startled to hear my mother calling my name up the same staircase where she used to rouse us for school.  Something was wrong:   it was pitch dark, and I was grown up now, with a clock radio  to wake me up for work.  But it was my mother's voice that sent a chill through me; she was calling my name in a voice filled with a panic I'd never heard before.   She had found my father dead.  Only several hours before that, I was sitting on the floor in front of the living room stove, correcting papers.  He was reading as usual   in his  chair by the window.  He'd gone upstairs to bed while I was alone downstairs.  That was the last time I saw him alive.  He was 71 years old.