George Elwood Ellis

Not long after my father’s initial hospitalization in December, I made my husband go shopping for a new suit. “For my mental health,” I think I said. The clerk at the Haggar store was a talkative, colorful man and I watched with amusement as he held a pair of hapless shoppers hostage regaling them with his personal chronicles of Sunday mornings as a young boy dressed in a 3-piece suit, Fedora, alligator shoes and a cane. I poked my head into my husband’s dressing room and whispered, “It’s like being visited by the spirit of my father.” Anyone who knew my dad, sooner or later, found themselves cornered while he delivered a story loudly, passionately, lengthily, and with little to no regard to your actual interest level.

My father loved stories and he filled my life with them. Some stories were about himself or his family; growing up in the 50s, the son of a Philly steelworker with a brother who had a ridiculous pompadour and a little sister who was scared to death by the movie, The Thing. Most were stories he had collected in his ravenous studies and shared again with relish. I remember him reciting poetry to me as a little girl: The Touch of the Master’s Hand and The Love Song of Hiawatha. He read me Pilgrim’s Progress and The Chronicles of Narnia. Together we explored everything from Tudor history to Star Trek. We watched every movie version ever made of The Man for All Seasons and Les Misérables. He took me to see live Shakespeare and we listened the Metropolitan Opera Broadcast on Saturdays. We discussed all these stories and what they taught us, again and again. He loved the little details that made art, music, and world events so much more than facts, but rather more intimate narratives of people overcoming hardships, cultivating love, and being beautifully, messily human.

There was one story he told me, however, that was more important than all the rest and it went like this: Once upon a time, a long time ago in a town called Bethlehem, the Lord God became flesh and dwelt among us. This storytelling son of a carpenter went on to die for the sins of the whole world, even the sins of one storytelling son of a steelworker born in a working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia. Through this story, all the days of my father’s life, both good and bad, are redeemed. And in sharing that story with me, all the days of my life are redeemed also.

In his final days, I sat by my father’s bedside and read to him from C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle. I can still hear my father’s voice reading that book to me one evening in elementary school while we had dinner at Burger King (because no place was sacred to that man). He loved the ending and so I brought the little volume my husband Matthew had read from to my own children and spoke these words in his last moments.

Then Aslan turned to them and said: "You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be."

Lucy said, "We're so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often."

"No fear of that," said Aslan. "Have you not guessed?"

Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.

"There was a real railway accident," said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are — as you used to call it in the ShadowLands — dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."

And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Grace Ellis Barber -June 4, 2022