My Father’s Feet: Jazz, Hospice & Saying Goodbye to My Dad

About this episode

For twenty years, Jeff’s father wore a pinstriped Brooks Brothers suit every day, riding the Metro-North from Connecticut to an office on 45th and First. Somewhere in that daily friction, his trousers wore the hair from his legs and left his feet improbably smooth. As a boy, Jeff would rub them on the couch after dinner, often reluctantly. It was the simplest pleasure his father knew. Decades later, those same feet are swollen with edema at the end of a hospice bed in Miami.

In this episode, Jeff turns from fatherhood to being a son. He spends a week at his dad’s bedside with his brother Eric, and after days of trying to fix everything, Jeff finally stops. He puts on Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald and takes his father’s feet in his hands one last time. In that small act of tending, time folds in on itself: a boy on the couch, a man who walked so many city blocks, a father briefly free of his failing body. There’s nothing left to say and nothing left to fix, only the care a son can give with his hands.

This is the twentieth episode of Diaries of a Dance Dad, an audio memoir series in Jeff’s own words. It spans the full arc of parenthood: the inhale of birth and early chaos, the grind of no sleep and travel with kids, the gut-punches of failure, and the slow exhale of letting go.

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