Chapter 14 Summary: Key Themes and Analysis

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

⚠️ This chapter includes the death of the narrator's father, Lou Sedaris, which occurs a few weeks after the visit described here. The chapter also discusses the father's cognitive decline, his recovery from COVID-19, and his surprising political reversal. If you prefer to encounter these developments in the book itself, stop reading now.

Summary

The chapter opens in early April, three days before the father's ninety-eighth birthday. David, Amy, and Hugh fly from New York to Raleigh, North Carolina, to visit Lou Sedaris at Springmoor, an assisted living facility where he has lived for three years. The plan is to visit and then drive to the family beach house on Emerald Isle.

The father greets them cheerfully from his wheelchair, dressed and groomed for the occasion with a red bandanna tied around his neck. Hugh, in his role as the non-blood relative, turns off the television and finds a jazz station on the radio. David reflects on his own political disengagement since Biden's inauguration—he no longer obsessively reads political news or listens to political podcasts, and he thinks of COVID as something from a long-ago time now that he's vaccinated.

The father had tested positive for the coronavirus shortly before Christmas, around the time he began wheeling himself to the front desk asking if anyone had seen his mother. Lisa, one of the sisters, handles calls about the father's confusion, reminding him that his mother died in 1976 and is buried in Cortland, New York. The father recovered without hospitalization and lost ten pounds.

During the visit, the father shows signs of cognitive decline—he insists he's a hundred years old (Amy corrects him: ninety-eight on Monday), and he mishears the word