Margaret’s Father’s Sudden Death

Margaret Campbell’s father’s sudden death is an offstage event whose force unfolds through its delayed effects: it brings grief to the surface after an initial numbness and breaks the fragile ties keeping Margaret in China. His unexpected death also leaves her facing decisions about where her future lies, decisions she had long avoided.

Circumstances and Distance

Margaret’s father drops dead in his university lecture room from a massive coronary thrombosis. His death is quick and painless, and completely unexpected. The abruptness offers no preparation for those left behind; Margaret recognizes that what might seem the best way to die for the person who dies can be devastating for the people who must absorb the loss.

At the time, Margaret is in Beijing. Her mother conveys the news in a short, cold phone call. Margaret has not seen her father for nearly two years, and their contact has dwindled to a handful of phone conversations. The physical distance mirrors a relationship already marked by absence, but it does not prevent the loss from becoming a turning point in her life.

Grief That Arrives Later

After hearing the news, Margaret sits for a long time in the small apartment provided by the Public Security University. She is disturbed by the emptiness she feels and by the possibility that she may not be grieving. The emotion arrives only later: she wakes in the middle of the night with tears of her own, discovering a sorrow that her first reaction had concealed rather than disproved.

This delay shapes the event’s emotional meaning. The death is sudden, but Margaret’s recognition of grief is not immediate. Her response emerges in a private moment after the call, when there is no one else to witness it. The gap between her apparent numbness and those later tears makes bereavement something she must discover within herself.

The Funeral and the Empty Room

On the day her father is buried, Margaret cannot bear to look at his body in the coffin. The mortician has carefully colored his face to suggest life, but she cannot accept the body as her father; to her, he has already vanished, remaining only in other people’s memories and in flickering old home-movie images. Family photographs offer little comfort, seeming to preserve moments without the personality that gave them life.

While laughter and the clink of glasses rise from the wake, Margaret resents the guests’ apparent lightness on the day of the burial. She withdraws to her father’s den, shuts the door, and listens to the silence. The room has been left as it was when he died, its heavy curtains dimming the late-afternoon light. There, among the books he had read and marked, she can still sense the private life that has ended. His half-smoked pipe remains beside his desk; the teeth marks around its mouthpiece and the familiar tobacco scent connect the untouched room to habits that will not resume.

The Life His Death Disrupts

The loss finally forces Margaret to break her ties with China. Those ties had been fragile, held in place only by a man she thought she loved. Returning home does not settle what comes next: it brings her back to decisions about her future that she has postponed and does not want to face.

For nearly three days after her return to Chicago, Margaret avoids her apartment in Lincoln Park, where neighbors have been collecting her mail and watering her plants during her absence of more than eighteen months. Instead, she stays in her childhood bedroom in Oak Park, choosing its familiarity over the past associated with the man she had married. Her father’s death thus brings her home while leaving her unsure how to inhabit that home or what future to choose; even amid the wake and the objects preserved in his den, she recognizes that retreat is not the same as resolution.