Photography suited my father, loner that he was. He’d come home from his job as an airline pilot, give Mother a peck on the cheek before changing out of his uniform, and drive off again with at least one of his three Rolleiflex cameras. When I was a child growing up in North Carolina during the early fifties, he’d acknowledge me only if I was in his direct path.

When I was six, my mother finally got tired of the beatings and left my father for good. I remember the final blow: I was standing outside, looking through the front-door window at my father mercilessly pounding my mother’s face into the checked tile floor of our run-down two-bedroom house on the outskirts of Slidell, Louisiana.

I like to take my time when I pronounce someone dead. The bare-minimum requirement is one minute with a stethoscope pressed to someone’s chest, listening for a sound that is not there; with my fingers bearing down on the side of someone’s neck, feeling for an absent pulse; with a flashlight beamed into someone’s fixed and dilated pupils, waiting for the constriction that will not come.