{"id":17790,"date":"2022-03-13T20:57:12","date_gmt":"2022-03-14T00:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/?p=17790"},"modified":"2024-08-27T16:57:59","modified_gmt":"2024-08-27T20:57:59","slug":"my-fathers-hands-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/2022\/my-fathers-hands-3\/","title":{"rendered":"My Father’s Hands"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n My Father’s Hands\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

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\u2019s of bone and blood, a surgeon\u2019s. 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\u2019t look like he had energy for that today, either.
\nHis 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.
\nMy sister-in-law leaned into him slightly. \u201cFrank, it\u2019s Shelley.\u201d He opened his eyes, turning his head to look at her. \u201cHow are you today?\u201d His previous stroke mumbled his sounds but we could understand, \u201cI feel awful.\u201d 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.
\nI 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.
\nHe 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\u2019 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.
\nThese hands handled tables saws and drills in his basement workshop, building shelves, fixing his children\u2019s 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.
\nHe 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, \u201cLet\u2019s look at your bump, little man.\u201d He touched the boy\u2019s forehead, brushing the soft brown hair back slightly as he cradled the child\u2019s skull in the palm of his left hand. \u201cYou\u2019re going to be all right. You go find your Momma now.\u201d The boy\u2019s tears stopped instantly, and he ran to the far corner where his mother sat in her chair, waiting for him.
\nThe 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s of bone and blood, a surgeon\u2019s. Lying on his back, he was congested and struggling to breathe. I saw as soon as I walked into the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoir"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17790"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17797,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17790\/revisions\/17797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}