Healing hands

This past Friday was my father’s 88th birthday. Or it would have been if we’d been lucky and he’d survived the two different kinds of cancer that struck when he was exactly the age I am now. But we weren’t and he didn’t, so I spent much of the day as one does on these mournful anniversaries—trying to manifest my father’s presence in my mind.

I don’t have many memories of being a young child. Just hazy images of isolated moments, like outtakes from an old movie. But one of my clearest impressions is of walking somewhere with my father. I was quite young at the time, and I don’t know where we were going or why. All I really remember is the overwhelming feeling of safety that came from reaching up and putting my small, sweaty hand into the warmth of my father’s large, dry palm.

Dad was a big man. Big in all the usual ways. Tall, almost 6’3”, with a solid build he had to work hard to keep from adding too much fat. Big feet. Big hands, with long, narrow fingers.

Perhaps all that size made him klutzy, one of his many physical traits I’ve inherited. The scientific term is proprioception, the body’s ability to sense its position, movement, and equilibrium without visual clues. Apparently, my father and I were both born with virtually none of that ability. He was famous for coming in for a hug and stepping on your foot. Just as I am famous for head butting my children while trying to kiss them on the cheek.

Despite his large hands, my father was not at all “handy.” He had no interest in plumbing or carpentry and broke more household items than he ever fixed. On the rare occasions he did get involved in some “puttering” as my mother called it, the exercise ended quickly and usually with a fight, my father unable to put aside his bossy ways and my mother unwilling to accept instructions from a man who had no idea what he was doing.

“His hands are blessed in other ways” became Mom’s mantra, words of wisdom from her own mother in a rare moment of insight from someone who never seemed to be my father’s biggest fan.

His hands were blessed in other ways. As a pediatric infectious disease specialist, Dad took care of the sickest kids in most of the hospitals he visited. Winking as he gently laid his stethoscope on their chests and listened to their hearts. Holding their shoulders steady as they leaned forward so he could move the stethoscope onto their backs and listen to their lungs. Tap, tap, tapping their backs with his index and middle fingers to feel for fluid buildup and the dreaded pneumonia.

Ironically, when we were sick, my mother was the one who handled most of the minute-by-minute caregiving. She was the one who cleaned up our vomit and made us comfortable on the couch. She was the one who cooked us chicken soup and stirred our Coca Cola to make it flat. She was the one who would sleep on the floor next to our beds on particularly bad nights. Always the doctor, never the nurse, my father was the one who examined us and decided the course of treatment, first laying his big palm on our foreheads to check for fever, then showing us how to say “AHHH” while he peered down our throats, then lightly pressing up and down our necks to feel for swollen glands. Sometimes the stethoscope came out of his leather doctor’s bag, sometimes the device to check for an ear infection. But the end of the exam was always the same—a squeeze of the shoulder, a wink, and the assurance you were going to be fine.

Growing up, I never had another doctor, which probably wouldn’t happen now. But because I never knew anything else, it was my father who came to signify healing and comfort to me. His big hands, so awkward in other situations, became graceful and adept during medical exams, those long fingers always as gentle as possible under the circumstances. Not that Dad was always gentle, of course. My brothers and I all have traumatic memories of him yanking out baby teeth that were just about but not quite loose enough to fall out on their own, probably out of fear we’d somehow end up choking on them. For the most part though, his ministrations were firm but soft, his hands seeing what his eyes might not.

Even after my father got sick and stopped seeing patients, he remained our family doctor. When my youngest son was born and required a stay in the neonatal intensive care unit in Manhattan, Dad immediately drove an hour from New Jersey to discuss the details of the baby’s care with the residents on staff, who did not hide their disdain for the persistent questions from an unknown, small-town pediatrician. Until the head of their department finally revealed my father was one of the experts whose name was on their infectious disease textbook, at which point the residents seemed to welcome his oversight. After all, none of them wanted to start their medical careers by killing Dr. Minnefor’s grandson. Even so, Dad never asked to examine the baby at the hospital. He saved that for the day after we brought Michael home. My father drove another hour to our Brooklyn apartment, leaning on his cane as he hobbled down the long hallway. Then he took his stethoscope out of his trusty bag, and tap, tap, tapped Michael’s back, those magical fingers ready to heal another generation. I held my breath until Dad handed me back the baby, and I heard him say, “He’s going to be fine.” But I didn’t truly relax until I felt the familiar, reassuring squeeze on my shoulder, my father’s big hand diminished by age and the weight loss from his illness yet still strong and firm, still the lifeline I reached for to know that all would, in fact, be well.