Orin phones Hal about Himself's suicide — "As we later reconstructed the scene…"
‘As we later reconstructed the scene, he’d used a wide-bit drill and small hacksaw to make a head-sized hole in the oven door, then when he’d gotten his head in he’d carefully packed the extra space around his neck with wadded-up aluminum foil.’
Context
The family's memory of the death is explicitly not a memory of the death: what Hal carries is a reconstruction — drill, hacksaw, foil, inferred sequence — assembled after the fact from a kitchen the blast had made unreadable. Orin catches the word twice and pries; the actual condition of the body never surfaces. What gets remembered is the engineering, because the engineering is all that could be reconstructed.