Steeply's father and M*A*S*H — "He died just before his birthday…"
‘He died just before his birthday. He died in his easy chair, set at full Recline, watching an episode in which Alda’s Hawkeye can’t stop sleepwalking and fears he’s going out of his fucking mind until a professional military therapist reassures him, I remember.’
Context
Death arrives in the recliner, chair "set at full Recline," mid-episode — the theme's signature end-state achieved by a rerun. That the final show is about a character who can't stop sleepwalking and fears he's losing his mind is the kind of joke the novel refuses to underline: the man consumed by watching dies watching a fiction of a man afraid he's asleep at the wheel of his own life. Steeply is careful to insist it was a transmural infarction, a family heart-history, not the show — but the correction only sharpens the panel, because the pathology didn't need to be the cause of death to have already been the death of the life. He'd stopped leaving the den, stopped leaving the chair; the heart was a formality.