"I tried to divert myself... from pondering what it would be like if my father died while I was sitting next to his bed, in a sleeper chair, wearing drawstring pajama bottoms and an 'Illmatic' T-shirt..."

"... with my stocking feet up on the extendable footrest and my iPad, in its keyboard case, open in my lap, writing a short film about Mr. Spock’s first day on the job. I wondered if I would see or otherwise sense the instant when the hundred billion neurons in my father’s brain abandoned the eighty-year feat of electrochemical legerdemain known as Robert Chabon, and the father I had loved so imperfectly, and by whom I had been so imperfectly loved, pulled off one last vanishing act. I can give you the exact date of the first time I ever saw Mr. Spock on TV, I said. September 15, 1967. Hmm, I had just started my fellowship at Albert Einstein. We were living in Flushing. So you would have been . . . ? Four. I must have sneaked out of bed, or come to ask for a glass of water. I didn’t know that it was Mr. Spock, or that you were watching 'Star Trek.' There was just this scary-looking guy with the ears and the eyebrows. A pointy-eared woman, too, with enormous hair. Super-scary music, two guys fighting in a place made out of rocks. One of them got his shirt slashed open... 'Amok Time' might not be the best, but I think it’s the most important, I said. How so? My father endured my disquisition with unusual forbearance. Like all our conversations from then on, this one was doomed to take place on my terms...."

From "The Final Frontier/I love Mr. Spock because he reminds me of you, I told my father. For the first time that night, I considered the possibility that he was going to survive it" by Michael Chabon (in The New Yorker).