remember very well the day my father died. It was the early morning of a Saturday in 1960. I was 16. My father was 55. I was awakened by the sound of his loud breathing — gasping, really — and by the sound of my mother’s voice from the room beside mine. We lived in a new suburban house in Mississippi. ‘‘Carrol?’’ I heard my mother saying. ‘‘Carrol, wake up.’’ Her voice was pleading, becoming uncertain, becoming afraid. My father’s heavy, gasping breaths continued. I got up and walked down the short hall to the open doorway of his room and looked in. As it was so long ago now, I don’t remember if my mother was leaning over his bed, or sitting on it, or if she was touching him, or standing beside him shouting. I only remember that my feet were cold because it was February. And I remember my pajamas being blue. And I remember that what I did was get on my knees in my father’s bed and shake him, shake his shoulders, pat his face — he seemed to be sleeping, possibly having a nightmare — saying as I did the name I called him. ‘‘Daddy, Daddy, wake up.’’ I could smell his large, sweaty body, feel his flaccid self, loose-limbed and malleable, his cheeks and mouth relaxed. He had quit gasping. I tried to open his mouth with my fingers and breathe in air. I tried to push down hard on his chest. I tried to move him. I put my arms around his shoulders and shook him. I heard my mother say, ‘‘Oh, God, no, no, no.’’ And I felt dread and terror, love and ferocity, confusion, physical exertion, a need for greater ingenuity, for greater efficiency, and I felt failure. In short, I experienced all the small and large coefficients of a son’s unswerving love.

Of course, I can tell you about all these events, these feelings, about this intimacy, this witness because my father didn’t die by having a jet airplane fly through his window and obliterate him without a thought. He didn’t die by being stupidly stabbed by a stranger in front of other strangers. He didn’t die by jumping out a window and falling 90 floors in terrified resignation. He wasn’t blown to smithereens while huddled in the back of a flying bomb not knowing what in God’s name would happen next but hoping, hoping something good would. And I myself wasn’t left standing on a sunny, bombed-out street holding his picture.

No, indeed not. My father died, if there is such a way to die, properly: in his house, in his bed, possibly in his sleep — before he was ready, to be sure; but in my very arms, and in the presence of his only wife. I think of those events on that cold morning every single day with sorrow, with wonder, with regret and with the confidence that whatever I was capable of doing to help him, I did do, and that perhaps he even knew it.

In Auden’s poem ‘‘Musée des Beaux Arts,’’ the luckless flier Icarus falls into the sea while a ploughman in a nearby field seems not to notice. ‘‘The ploughman may/Have heard the splash,’’ Auden wrote, ‘‘the forsaken cry,/But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone/As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green/Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,/Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.’’

It is an axiom of the novelist’s grasp on reality that a death’s importance is measured by the significance of the life that has ended. Thus to die, as so many did on Sept. 11 — their singular existences briefly obscured — may seem to cloud and invalidate life entirely. Yet their lives, though amazingly lost, remain indelible and will not by simple death be undone. They live still, and importantly, in all but the most literal ways.

But still. To steal life so, as their lives were stolen — rashly, violently, impersonally, pointlessly, improperly — perplexes not only their last precious moments, but also threatens to overwhelm us all, and to assign us, unwilling, the place of Auden’s ploughman, who, reasonably within his life, cannot give witness to enough. In this way — and we know it is by a terrible, indelicate design — precious life is made to seem unreverberant to those of us who remain here, those in whom life must reverberate, must signify, or all is lost.