One of my greatest joys during that winter was calling Dad. He had left to work in the United States, so that maybe one day we could all live there. We didn't have a phone at home, so Mom and I would go to the phone booth at Nanjing University, where Mom worked. Clutching a phone card in one hand and my watch in the other-for I was the official time keeper-I would squeeze into the phone booth with Mom. It was always so cold; pressed up against the glass walls of the booth, I could see my breaths transform into fantastic white shapes-now a galloping horse, now an angel, now a palace floating above the clouds-and they would linger in the air for a second before hitting the walls, forming a thousand tiny, shiny water droplets like the dew on leaves on spring mornings.

Sometimes, Mom would lift me up to the telephone so that I could dial the 11-digit number that both of us had long ago committed to memory. Then she put me down, and bending, put the phone between my ears and hers. Doooo. Doooo. Not yet. Doooo. Doooo.

Then I heard it. That voice-gentle, always so gentle-which in an instant brought back summer mornings and winter nights, the snowman we made and dressed in a checkered scarf, and the butterfly kite we had flown on the boundless fields of the university, running toward where the endless green met the endless blue of the sky.

"Hello," Dad said.

There was second of silence, for neither Mom nor I knew what to say: There was too much to hear, too much to tell. Then, suddenly, words gushed out of our mouths and hearts and minds, and like water through a broken dam, could not be stopped.

"Happy New-"

"Are you cold there? You should-"

"Are you eating well-"

We were all so eager to talk and had so little time that sometimes we all spoke at once.

Occasionally, Mom would give me the telephone to talk to Dad for a minute or two. I loved hearing about what Dad was wearing, what he ate for lunch (this gooey white thing called cheese, baked over a round piece of dough), the palm trees that line the streets in Florida and the white-sand beaches. I didn't understand half of the things he talked about, but that didn't matter. Pressed against the wall of the booth, watching my breath turn into white puffs, I felt I was lying on a beach under a palm, warm and happy, Mom and Dad beside me.

It was Good Friday, the 13th of April, and Grampa had checked out quite suddenly in the night while awaiting surgery the next morning. It was really just like him to throw us all off like that. By afternoon, the house had people in every crack. My mother, Biscuit; her sisters, Bear and Beany; their families and kids; and loads of miscellaneous family friends generally referred to as honorary cousins were all underfoot. It is important to know, I think, that more or less all of these people would have been there for Easter weekend even without Grampa's sudden departure. Which, as someone pointed out, certainly made the logistics of short-notice travel easier. In any case, we couldn't possibly let anything spoil Easter, a holiday our unapologetically irreverent family celebrates with gusto, because, after all, that's when the Easter Bunny comes.

And so we went on with the weekend, but sometimes we just stopped to be sad. One person stopped, or we all stopped; there were tears or there were no tears, but we stopped. Bear told me that when they were little, Grampa would pull out a big black marker before taking his daughters to the doctor. On their stomachs, he drew huge black smiley faces, and on their arms, he drew circles with arrows pointing to them labeled, "Put shot here." Beany said in that middle-of-the-night hospital room, all she really wanted to do was pull up Grampa's blue and white gown and draw one last huge smiley face on his stomach.

It is important to know that Fred Atwood had always been clear about two things concerning death: 1) No funeral. Period. 2) He would be cremated, and his ashes should be thrown in the nearest body of water-which, as he often pointed out, would most likely be a toilet bowl. (In his later years, Grum, my grandmother, convinced him that a toilet bowl was out of the question.) The Atwood clan has always been into big gatherings, so calling everyone we could think of to come over on Saturday afternoon was just the most obvious thing to do. A party isn't exactly a funeral, we figured. Honestly, he wouldn't have approved of that either, but as Grum said, "Tough, he's dead."