I’ve got two little brown-eyed girls back at home, a sitter who can stay until 1 a.m., and their father, Scott, standing next to me in his seersucker suit. I married him nearly a decade ago in this same chapel on the shady grounds of the Southwest School of Art, tucked along a slow curve of the San Antonio River.

“Come on,” I say. “We should dance while we can.”
Our own wedding reception was held in the garden, but my father managed to sneak upstairs and out onto the balcony, where he raised a flute of Champagne. An old-school WASP physician from the Midwest who would later endure both of my homebirths, he’d nonetheless had just about enough of the collectivist vibe of our wedding: a banjo processional, a woman preacher in cowboy boots, a Paul Éluard poem read in its original French, and me, walking through the grass in a ponytail, holding both his hand and my mother’s. The time had come for him to make sure everyone knew who was paying for this free-flowing love
.
“I’m the father of the bride,” he boomed. Later, he gulped a few of the half-finished mimosas that had been left on the patio, muttering, “Each one of those looks like a five-dollar bill flying away.”
Wynn, Scott’s only brother, was there too. A practicing Buddhist and perpetually underemployed English major, he could recite “Green Eggs and Ham” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” from memory. His other party trick involved nauseating contortions of his double-jointed elbows and knees. During the ceremony he’d given a little speech about the Buddhist concept of sangha, which can refer to a gathering of like-minded people coming together in support of a common idea, our marriage in this case. The rings were passed until everyone had touched them, and then returned to us, warm.

Six years later I was on the University of Texas campus, eight months pregnant and waddling out of a graduate school workshop on prose poems, when I got the first phone call: my father, saying that the dye test used to see whether a melanoma found on his chest was spreading to his lymph system had come back clear.
“Well, Niffer,” he said, “I’d say we dodged a bullet.”
Less than an hour later, as I headed home to San Antonio on I-35, my cellphone buzzed again. This time it was my husband, his voice soft with disbelief, saying they’d found Wynn in his apartment in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston.

“Found him how?” I said, confused, or at least hoping I was.
The signal dropped before he could reply. I set the phone on the passenger seat, then looked at it when it shuddered back to life, an insect I wasn’t eager to pick up. For 37 years, Wynn had slept with a stuffed Paddington Bear. His friend found the bear with him in bed where he’d swallowed a bottle of antidepressants. This was not his first struggle with staying here on earth, only his last.

Dad was dead less than a year later, the tumors that no one could see like ghosts filling his lungs, liver and brain. The last time I saw him alive, we ate enchiladas and drank margaritas on the River Walk. He piled on the fire-roasted salsa despite the ravage a last-ditch bio-chemo protocol was wreaking on his intestines. His familiar claim that he wasn’t hungry, followed by his subsequent scavenge of everyone else’s plate, made the day seem almost normal.

But as we stood to leave he stared at the bill, his brain unable to remember how to calculate a tip. Later, at the airport, he struggled to get out of the passenger seat of my Subaru, stumbling backward, grabbing for the door, which then shut hard on his fingers, trapping them. He looked at me, eyes desperate.

Source: New York Times Nov 26, 2010 by Jenny Browne