Big Hands

 

Angkor Wat - photo by JoAnn Sturman

Scott Sturman

I had not seen my father for a long while, so I did not know what to expect when I entered his hospital room. He lay on his back covered with a single white sheet in a modest, dimly lit room at the end of the hall.  He looked peaceful, and his face was exactly the way I remembered it.  When his breathing paused, the room was silent.  After what seemed to be a very long time, his chest began to move until the breaths became deep and fast, then they would fade away until the next cycle began.

Two days ago my brother Sam called me, telling of a major heart attack and a poor prognosis.  During his youth, Dad lived a rough life on a ranch in Wyoming, boxed and played football well, and after college was wounded three times in two wars, but now his time had come.  Too long an interval elapsed between his cardiac arrest and the placement of a breathing tube.  A day later when it was clear he sustained severe brain damage, his doctor complied with the family’s wishes and removed all life support.  All expected Dad to die within a few hours, but to their surprise he continued to breath without assistance.  He was taken to a private room, and now well into his 87th year, was left to pass away on his own time.

I approached the bedside, sat on a chair near his head, grasped his hand, leaned toward him, and whispered in his ear, “Dad, it’s Scott.”  And then I pulled the sheet away from his arm and noticed the powerful hand, muscular and calloused with a scar on the fourth finger from a gunshot wound during WWII.  The palm was broad and the fingers short in comparison.  It was a hand used to hard work, to fighting other men, to writing letters with a clear, steady stroke, and to hold his children on his lap many years ago.  Age thinned the skin, but these hands still could dig, lift, and pull. 

For the next half hour I held Dad’s hand and thought about his triumphs and defeats, his honesty, his modesty, his patriotism, his stubbornness, his sense of humor, and his rigid code of ethics which often collided with my own.  His hands and persona were one in the same.  And then his breathing stopped once and for all.  I hugged him, cried, and thanked him for waiting to say goodbye to me.

Later that afternoon I returned to the house where I was raised and found four bulky bags of peat moss laying on the lawn in the backyard where Dad dropped them.  It seemed unusual to find them strewn haphazardly, since he was by nature a tidy man.  The exertion of lifting and carrying them from the alley to the backyard took its toll on his heart and must have hurried his work.  The bags looked heavy, so to satisfy my curiosity, I hefted a bag to my chest and stepped on a scale I had found nearby.  Unable to see the scale due to the girth of the load, my wife peered beneath the bag and exclaimed, “245 pounds total!  Each one weighed 70 pounds!"  Yet a few days ago a man nearly 90 years old felt it was well within his capabilities to carry them on his own.

The back of my hands are no longer the hands of a young man.  Two fingers are crooked from old fractures, the skin lined and spotted, and the veins no longer straight, but the palms are different.  They are wide with skin thick, and still able to form beautiful letters on a piece of paper or dig up a tree stump.  Like you, Dad, I hope my hands tell a story about me.