He talks to him while he gets dressed so as not to frighten him. He goes down to the patio still full of mud. The parrot doesnÂ’t move. Dr. Urbino holds out his walking stick so the bird can sit on it as a perch as he often does, but the parrot moves away to a higher branch. Dr. Urbino notices the house ladder is leaning against the tree. He steps onto it singing a song which the bird sings along with him but moves a little further away. He steps up onto the second rung, then keeps moving up to the fourth rung. His servant, Digna Pardo comes out to remind him about the funeral and exclaims at seeing him on the ladder, "youÂ’ll kill yourself!" He catches the parrot around the neck, but then releases him because the ladder slips out from under him. He is suspended in air. He realizes he has died without Communion, without repenting, and without time to say good-bye to anyone, "at seven minutes after four on Pentecost Sunday."

Fermina Daza is in the kitchen when she hears Digna PardoÂ’s exclamation. She tries to run, screaming, and her heart jumps when she sees her husband lying on the ground, still resisting death until she could get to him. He recognizes her and "through tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her," he "looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous , more grief stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of shared life." He says, "Only God knows how much I loved you."

He never accepted the many public offices offered him. He always voted Liberal though more out of tradition than conviction. He still knelt in the street when the Archbishop rode by. He called himself a "natural pacifist." In his public conduct, however, he behaved in such a way that no group claimed him as their own. He did two things that broke with his image. First, he left the former palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, which his family had lived in for more than a hundred years, and moved to the new rich neighborhood where he died. The second was his marriage to a beautiful woman who belonged to the lower classes. The women of his class scorned her until they saw that she was better than they in distinction and character. He was always aware that he was the last in his line. He considers his children "two undistinguished ends of a line." After fifty years his son, Marco Aurelio, who is a doctor, had done nothing of note and had no children. His daughter, Ofelia, married a bank employee from New Orleans and had three daughters. Yet, he worried most about Fermina Daza having to live alone after he died.

The death of the doctor spreads to the common people of the city. They all come out to the streets in hopes of seeing something. The city proclaims three days of mourning. A famous artist paints a portrait of the doctor on the stepladder at the moment he stretched out his hand to reach the parrot. The portrait is hung in the gallery of the city so people can see it. The entire city files past it. Then the portrait is hung on the walls of all the public and private institutions that want to pay tribute to him. Years later, it is pulled down by art students and burned in the Plaza of the University as a symbol of a time they hated.

Fermina Daza is not as helpless a widow as her husband had feared sheÂ’d be. She determinedly refuses to let the body of her husband to be used for any cause, even when the President of the Republic sent a telegram to her to ask that the body lie in state for public viewing. She also opposes a vigil in the Cathedral which the Archbishop requests. She holds firm to her belief that the dead belong only to the family. She closes the doors after the funeral and opens them only for intimate friends.

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