The night before his ninety-fifth-birthday party, my father fell while turning around in his kitchen. My sister Lisa and her husband, Bob, dropped by hours later to hook up his new TV and discovered him on the floor, disoriented and in pain. He fell again after they righted him, so an ambulance was called. At the hospital, they met up with our sister Gretchen, and with Amy, who’d just flown in from New York to attend the party, which was now cancelled. “It was really weird,” she said when we spoke on the phone the following morning. “Dad thought Lisa was Mom, and when the doctor asked him where he was he answered, ‘Syracuse’—where he went to college. Then he got mad and said, ‘You’re sure asking a lot of questions.’ As if that’s not normal for a doctor. I think he thought this was just some guy he was talking to.”

Fortunately, he was lucid again by the following afternoon. That was the hard part for everyone—seeing him so confused.

On the night that my father fell, I was in Princeton, the fourth of eighty cities I would be travelling to for work. On the morning he was moved from the hospital to a rehabilitation center, I was on my way to Ann Arbor. Over the next week, he had a few little strokes, the sort people don’t notice right away. One affected his peripheral vision, and another his short-term memory. He’d wanted to return home after leaving rehab, but by this point there was no way he could continue to live alone. I wrote him a letter, saying, in part, “It isn’t safe for you at the house anymore, at least not on your own, and this concerns me. I need you to live long enough to see Donald Trump impeached.”

We’d fought bitterly after the election, and I knew it would be just my luck: my father would die, and the very next day the President would go down, denying me a well-deserved opportunity to gloat.

I’m not sure where I was when my father moved into his retirement home. Springmoor, it’s called. I saw it, finally, four months after his fall, when Hugh and I flew to North Carolina. It was early August, and we arrived to find him in an easy chair, blood flowing from his ear at what seemed to me like a pretty alarming rate. It looked fake, like beet juice, and was being dabbed at by a nurse’s assistant. “Oh, hello,” my father said, his voice soft and weary-sounding.

I thought he didn’t know who I was, but then he added my name and held out his hand. “David.” He looked behind me. “Hugh.” Someone had wrapped his head with gauze, and when he leaned back he resembled the late English poet Edith Sitwell, very distinguished-looking, almost imperious. His eyebrows were thin and barely perceptible. It was the same with his lashes. I guess that, like the hairs on his arms and legs, they just got tired of holding on.

“So what happened?” I asked, though I already knew. Lisa had told me that morning on the phone that his grandfather clock had fallen on him. It was made of walnut and bronze and had an abstract human face on it, surrounded by numbers that were tilted at odd angles. My mother always referred to it as Mr. Creech, after the artist who made it, but my dad calls it Father Time.

I’d said to Hugh after hanging up with Lisa, “When you’re ninety-five, and Father Time literally knocks you to the ground, don’t you think he’s maybe trying to tell you something?”

“He insisted on moving it himself,” the woman attempting to stanch the bleeding said, “and it cut his ear. We sent him to the hospital for stitches, but now it’s started up again, maybe because he’s on blood thinners, so we’ve called an ambulance.” She raised her voice, even though my father is not hard of hearing. “HAVEN’T WE, LOU? HAVEN’T WE CALLED AN AMBULANCE?!”

At that moment, two E.M.T. workers came in, both young and bearded, like lumberjacks. Each took an elbow and helped my father to stand.

“Are we going somewhere?” he asked.

“BACK TO THE HOSPITAL!” the woman shouted.

“All right,” my father said. “O.K.”

They wheeled him out, and the woman explained that, while the staff would remove bloodstains from the carpet, it was the family’s job to get them off any privately owned furniture. “I can bring you some towels,” she suggested.

A few moments later, another aide walked into the room. “Excuse me,” she said, “but are you the famous son?”

“I’m a pretty sorry excuse for famous,” I told her. “But, yes, I’m his son.”

“So you’re Dave? Dave Chappelle? Can I have your autograph? Actually, can I have two?”

“Um, sure,” I said.

I’d just joined Hugh in cleaning the easy chair when the woman, who seemed slightly nervous, the way you might be around a world-famous comedian who is young and black and has his whole life ahead of him, returned for two more autographs.

“I’m the worst son in the world,” I told her, reaching for the scraps of paper she was holding out. “My father fell on April 7th, and this is the first time I’ve visited, the first time I’ve talked to him, even.”

“You put yourself down too much,” the woman said. “Just pick up the phone every so often—that’s what I do with my mother.” She offered a forgiving smile. “You can make that second autograph to my supervisor.” And she gave me a name.

The blood on our wet rags looked even faker than the blood I’d watched falling from my father’s ear. I took a few halfhearted swipes at the easy chair, but it was Hugh who did most of the work. Mainly, I looked at the things my dad had decorated his room with: Father Time, a number of the streetscapes he and my mother bought in the seventies, rocks he’d carried back from fishing trips, each with a date and the name of the river it had come from written on it. All of it was so depressing to me. Then again, even a unicorn would have looked dingy in this place. I don’t know if it was the lighting, or the height of the ceiling. Perhaps it was the hospital bed against the wall, or the floor-length curtains that looked as if they’d come from a funeral parlor. Down the hall, a dozen or so residents, most in wheelchairs and some drooling onto bibs, were watching “M*A*S*H” on television.

I couldn’t help but think of Mayview, the nursing home my father put his mother in, back in the mid-seventies. It seemed like only yesterday that I’d gone with him to see her. If now here I was, visiting him in a similar place, wouldn’t it be me, in the blink of an eye, in my own retirement center, me the frail widower reduced to a single room? Only I won’t have children to look after me, the way my father has Lisa, who had been extraordinary, and my brother Paul and Amy and Gretchen. My sister-in-law Kathy had outdone everyone, stopping by sometimes twice a day, taking Dad to lunch, rubbing lotion into his feet. I was the only exception. Me. Dave Chappelle.