They lay on the hospital sheet, still and thin, the tapered fingers slender and the nails clipped short as he always kept them. Beautiful hands, delicate, skillful, an artist’s of bone and blood, a surgeon’s. Lying on his back, he was congested and struggling to breathe. I saw as soon as I walked into the room that today he was not better than yesterday. The nursing staff, overloaded with ever increasing numbers of CPVID patients on the ward had not had time to help him groom and move to his Geri-chair. It didn’t look like he had energy for that today, either.
His pure white hair was thinning at the edges of his temples, but long and thick, his eyebrows still thick. Only his face looked thinner, wasting after three weeks of hospital care, unable to take anything by mouth because of his congestion and choking after his pneumonia.
My sister-in-law leaned into him slightly. “Frank, it’s Shelley.” He opened his eyes, turning his head to look at her. “How are you today?” His previous stroke mumbled his sounds but we could understand, “I feel awful.” He closed his eyes and sank back into himself. His open mouth gasped for air he could barely draw down into his lungs. Every breath was a battle.
I put my hand in his, palm to palm, and held it but he pulled his out. He was moving into his solitary final struggle. My eyes prickled. I swallowed.
He was always stoic. A general surgeon in a small town, he held life and death in his hands for forty years, day and night. Those hands brought babies into the world, my classmates’ younger brothers, they answered the black dial telephone beside his bed in the middle of the night, then buttoned his clothes and steered his car to the hospital for emergency appendectomies on Christmas Eve. My classmates and their families in our small town were his patients, and he never spoke a word at home about the work his hands had done professionally. These hands scrubbed to enter the operating room, then grasped the scalpels and needles, the tools of his trade as he incised abdomens, re-sectioned bowels, removed tumours, tailored flesh for healing.
These hands handled tables saws and drills in his basement workshop, building shelves, fixing his children’s bicycles, working with his sons to build bird houses. He knelt on the cold black tiles beside the basement drain to unscrew the cover and thread in the plumbing snake to unplug the drain that was causing the washing machine to flood.
He was an intensely private man, deeply feeling, always gentle. When small Pablo fell backwards off the piano bench one evening when his family, newly arrived from Argentina for a scientific research project at the Research Laboratory, it was my father who picked him up, “Let’s look at your bump, little man.” He touched the boy’s forehead, brushing the soft brown hair back slightly as he cradled the child’s skull in the palm of his left hand. “You’re going to be all right. You go find your Momma now.” The boy’s tears stopped instantly, and he ran to the far corner where his mother sat in her chair, waiting for him.
The hands that had brought a rose to his first-born daughter on the morning of her birth now lay still on the coverlet. They were beautiful hands, the most beautiful hands I have ever known.