Ellen Winn: How to Say Goodbye to Dad and Hello to Your Babies

Flash Nonfiction by Ellen Winn
HOW TO SAY GOODBYE TO YOUR DAD AND HELLO TO YOUR BABIES

Go to your dad’s first oncology appointment when you’re eight months pregnant with your first child. It will be unclear who needs a chair more—him or you.

Host a breakfast for your dad and family before your brother’s wedding; be two weeks postpartum, worried your dad will never see these people again. For that reason alone, scrub the bathroom floor while you’re still bleeding.

Wait two weeks for baby and dad to meet; he’s been too busy and sick with early chemo to travel. Giddily place the baby in his arms while he reminds you of the Southern adage, “A house without a baby under two ain’t worth diddly-squat.” Feel relieved; you’ve made good on the adage—made a child for your father, made him a grandfather. Know you’ll fall short, but promise your kids the messy, real childhood you had—full of the Beatles, birthday poems, All Things Considered, stick-shift cars, and fried-chicken-latke-sweet-tea dinners when Mom was out of town.

Visit often. Take the car, the train, the plane. Bring a baby each time, even if they are prone to blowouts before getting through security; the look in his increasingly hollow eyes when you hand him the baby is worth it. Take him to lunch. Ask him what he’s been up to. “Contemplating my mortality,” he’ll tell you. His wife bears the primary burden; do your inadequate best to lighten it. Put her and the baby down to nap while you—honestly, awkwardly—tend to him.

Forge ahead regardless of snow delays, life delays. Showing up with one baby means leaving another and the toddler at home, means nursing and schlepping the pump, means twitchy eyes and crabby kids—means forgoing the luxury of not seeing. Read the scan emails through your fingers. Cheer when the numbers improve and he’s improbably back on the tennis court—“like some sort of Presbyterian ninja,” your brother will say in his eulogy. Grimace when they deteriorate and so does he, impossible not to watch him wane as the babies wax.

Tandem-nurse in the church before you give his eulogy. Preparing to eulogize your father, an English professor who could smell a split infinitive from a mile away, is not nothing. You’re sweating the small stuff—and through your Ann Taylor wrap dress. Though not given to the metaphysical, it’s obvious he’s somewhere paying attention. Play with form: lists, odes, haiku, free verse—they’re all maudlin and ill-fitting. At your best you’re just quoting his comments on student papers: “I will not read another paper this devoid of critical content or this full of mechanical error.” Come up with something to say in that pastoral church he never attended. The words are blurry, lacking the precision he would expect. Your husband and brother holding hands in the pews as you talk is indelible.

Greet his friends and colleagues and college a cappella group—shaky with gratitude. They’ve all come a long way to Vermont in mud season. Later, stupid with exhaustion, leave all your valuables at the church; your best friend and husband will have to break in to recover them. Show the picture of your dad with his two children and four grandchildren to everyone—the only one ever snapped.

Ellen Winn is a writer based in Montclair, New Jersey. She writes about identity, endurance, and feminism. Her work is forthcoming in Midway Journal. She works as a consultant focused on equity in public education. She is at work on a braided memoir about uncertainty, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves—drawn from the experience of raising identical twins.