"My Father's Hands"

By A.E. Bayne

My father's hands were not too large, but they were callused to some degree because he worked with tools around the house on the weekend. He had large arthritic looking knuckles, but I don't' think he had arthritis in his hands. They felt tough, but he had small nails, cut short, which he cleaned with a file. He was impeccably neat. Looking back, I've no idea how he was able to stay so neat and clean, almost fastidiously so.



My father's hands were crafty. He built wooden shelves, decks, bookcases, used measuring tools, painted. He was a mathematician who always wanted to study architecture, but never did. He loved to mow the grass, use his hands in the dirt, and fix machines. He was a handy-man at heart.

His hands were not the type to caress, at least not me, his child. I can't speak for my mother, but I have the feeling she'd say the same. Instead, I'd receive a strong, reassuring pat/hug. His hands were very protective, very solid. I always felt sheltered in the nook of his arm.

When it first happened, when those hands were no longer giving me hugs and pats, I did not cry. After holding him up during a morphine induced struggle for breath while the ambulance came and left with the "do not resuscitate" order, after my hands tightened around his in the hospital and I sang him into death, it felt like he was merely on a trip, a vacation. A year or two into it, when my mind wrapped itself around the fact that he wasn't ever coming back, the tears fell hot and constant in his absence. Even after eight years, I miss him every day. I wonder if the memories will always make me feel as if my body wants to turn itself inside out with grief. My heart breaks, it literally stops and tightens in my chest, and there is no stopping the tears as long as my thoughts are on him.



It is the deepest cut, to sever the ties of life with death. Even more than my failed marriage, which brought its own feelings of loss, the death of my father utterly destroys me. He left me a compass for sure, but I ache for the steady hands that guided me.