“A Silver Dish” was first published in the September 25, 1978, issue of The New Yorker. It was collected in Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984). It is currently most readily available in Bellow's Collected Stories (Penguin).

I love this story because it begins as every story, every poem, every play, every novel ever written might well begin: “What do you do about death?” That's Bellow for you: six words in, and we are confronted not only with the existential, the essential question, but with the straightforward, no-nonsense voice of the man who asks it: Woody Selbst, of Selbst Tile Company (“offices, lobbies, lavatories”), “a modern person, sixty years of age, and a man who's been around.”

Bellow then puts a fine point on the question: “How, against a contemporary background, do you mourn an octogenarian father, nearly blind, his heart enlarged, his lungs filling with fluid, who creeps, stumbles, gives off the odors, the moldiness or gassiness, of old men. I mean! As Woody put it, be realistic.”

In his Lectures on Literature Nabokov refers to the storyteller as a master magician, and I love this story because all that is masterful about Bellow's work, all that is magical, is on display as he swiftly conjures Woody's biography: two years in the seminary, mother a Christian convert, father Morris a Jew, “vital and picturesque,” who “relished risk or defiance,” and who is now one week in his grave, dressed in the Hawaiian shirt Woody himself had brought home from a tilers’ convention in Honolulu. A week in, Woody, this practical man, has been “too busy to attend to his own feelings except, intermittently, to note to himself, ‘First Thursday in the grave.’ ‘First Friday, and fine weather.’ ‘First Saturday; he's got to be getting used to it.’ Under his breath he occasionally said, ‘Oh, Pop.’”

Notice the sleight-of-hand in that last sentence: all the grief “A Silver Dish” will evoke and illustrate and grapple with is contained therein.