The e-mail from my Aunt Lynda said just “Call me” under the subject line: “Your father.” What has he got himself into now, I wondered. Was he about to get married, the romantic 70-year-old? Had he invented a new form of currency? Had a small island nation finally invited him to be their king? As I went downstairs imagining these pleasant and not unlikely scenarios, the phone rang.

My father died last Friday, abruptly, as if punched by a gigantic cartoon kangaroo, while sitting in front of two computers and a piano, working on eight or nine different projects. It’s a strange thing to say. The word that rings false in that sentence is “died.” Everyone who knew him knows what words would fit more aptly and characteristically in its place. My father laughed last Friday, abruptly. My father had a new idea last Friday, abruptly. My father made a new friend, last Friday, abruptly. My father called me, full of enthusiasm, last Friday, abruptly. Would that it were so. But this time the kangaroo won. Abruptly.

When you were with him, you always felt that exciting things were just about to happen. Parents are a child’s whole world, and the world with Tupper was unpredictable, weightless, charmed. It would not have surprised me to encounter talking animals, philosophical pirates, or a teenager named William Shakespeare any more than it would to meet a contrarian insight, a pun, or the portrait of a crushed paper bag executed with attention worthy of a dowager empress. Such things were the stuff of daily life with Tupper. The elements of his world never went to sleep or hardened into a rigid order; they were always up for recombination and surprise. Our house rang with music, laughter, and talk, as did every house he inhabited.

When his hands were on a piano keyboard, a paintbrush, or a sheet of paper, something individual, unaccountable, took place, and even if you had seen it happen a thousand times, it was still worth waiting for. I can only invoke the technical term, both theological and aesthetic, of “grace.” It comes unbidden, that extra something that doesn’t reduce to the conditions out of which it arises, in a merging of freedom and order like that found in the music of Sebastian Bach which he loved so much. Because we don’t know how to explain it or track it to the place it comes from, we call it a gift. Not that his gifts would have gone far without intense, hard work.

My father had the gift of friendship. His music, like his dwelling-place, was sociable. Everything he had heard and admired found its way into the weave. Repeated listening discovers patterns and echoes, an inner dialogue among eclectic elements, transformational play with modes and styles, a close, thinking partnership of words and melody.

He had a particular, sharp, demanding concept of freedom, one that led him to do things and put himself in situations that most of us would find intolerable. When he had persuaded himself of a truth, it became a moral necessity to do whatever that truth demanded. In this alone he was inflexible. This morality of his was hard to understand. Many of us suspected him of being playful. How wrong we were about that, events would show: ten years of court dates, ten years in hiding, fourteen months in a Federal prison. He hated to see other people deprived of their freedom, too, whether they were captive to what he thought of as tyranny or enslaved by tyrannical appetites. Since all of us make compromises and barter away bits of our freedom, this made conflict inevitable, even with his closest friends. But he was less burdened with remorse and bitterness than any man I have ever known. He died happy and fulfilled at the height of his powers, with exciting things to do in his datebook, hundreds of close friends, a small number of satisfying antagonists, and brilliant work yet to be completed. He never had to know what it is to be diminished, dependent, anything less than himself.

When I was seven years old, my father called me over one day to tell me that he had decided to give up his job at the advertising agency and devote himself to music full-time. I cried. I suppose it was fear of change, dread at losing the routines that punctuated my life and made it exciting, like riding up the elevators in the L&C Building that made my stomach wobble. But what I said then was that I was sad that there wouldn’t be any more Cow and Kangaroo commercials on the television, those cartoons, famous among my first-grade set, that made me so proud to be his son. He laughed and said, “Don’t worry about that. Those commercials are going to stay on the TV. Nobody’s going to take them away. They’ll be there for years to come, they’ll be there after I’m dead and gone.” I recognize now one of the pitfalls of parenting. In trying to reassure me about one thing, he had given me something much bigger to worry about, something that had never occurred to me before. And to this day the idea remains inadmissible. But despite the inadvertent disclosure, he was telling me what he knew about art, what all artists know. Art goes on. The best of us breaks free of our lives and goes on to affect other people, strangers, people not yet born. Even music, which disappears the moment it’s made, engraves itself on the memory and demands to be replayed and re-performed. It was his singular grace to live as if that projection of enchantment into the future was the real dimension of his days, and to let everything else take care of itself. I know that we will never finish discovering Tupper Saussy.

In his comings and goings, but especially his goings, he resembled the wind, which bloweth where it listeth and can’t be trapped in a bottle. He was a byword for surprise, as if obedient to a law known to him alone. And so too with this departure. On March 16, with the sudden bursting of a blood vessel, this determined and unpredictable man finally surprised himself.