Death: he drinks himself to a cerebral hemorrhage on a Tucson stairway

pivotal · UNDATED B.S. (after the desert return; before his son's adult prominence)

• When: UNDATED — after the retirement of event 9; he is "late" in every subsequent attestation (his son mourns him as "his own dear late father" by 1 April Y.T.M.P., and Avril's YDAU retrospection has him drinking "when alive")
• What: The same 071 sentence that retires him finishes him: back in the desert, he proceeds to "efficiently drink himself to a cerebral hemorrhage on a Tucson stairway." The detail recurs, stripped of place, at Mario's birth, when J.O.I. — watching Avril's water break on the brownstone staircase — is seized by dread: "His own father had dropped dead on a set of stairs." (071, p. 0312). The wraith's bedside account (event 13) supplies the family mythology's causation — the drinking and "unrealized potential" laid to the blank wooden man's account — with the attribution hedges kept in place. Nothing in the record puts any family member present at the death, names a date, or gives the stairway an address; the manner (drink, hemorrhage, stairs) is the whole of what is printed. His mid-monologue dread had been exact about everything but the setting: the tombstone reading "HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN," the dying "without ever being really seen."