Father's Hands

The light is beautiful this morning with grey, blue, and white in the skies - the temperature dropped yesterday and this morning, it is in the low 50 degrees, fahrenheit.  Today is Friday.

Watching father mostly live in a state of sleep these days.  This is what is happening with a man, whose life has been beyond full.  What is most striking in seeing him during the last visit was the pair of hands that rested atop his comforter.  Slender, long, and beautiful for 93 years of use.  Those hands loved working on cars, tinkering with anything that might be repaired with attention to a small detail, doing whatever was necessary to fix, move, clean after a family of six. He spent decades in a laboratory, working with the samples of blood that would reveal a patient's condition so that treatment plans could be made.  

Watching someone in their last chapter has a way of bringing one thing into focus: that is that life is inevitably and inextricably tied to death. There is no simpler way to say it.  The living that one does can take many forms and the adventures that open for each one in this lifetime are innumerable.  In his youth, he lived on a farm with parents, siblings, grandparents - intergenerational households were common.

The expectation that education would be his future meant taking a long train from north to south Korea, studying to enter into college so that the chance to live beyond a farm would open.  Then a war hit and it was not possible to be neutral. He fought as a young person, entering the military before he was twenty years of age.  He was captured and supposed to be killed.  But as he waited in a small shed with a few others, he saw a tiny light (so the story goes) in the back of the shed where a loose board was revealed in the night.  

"Escape!", was the invitation that he accepted.  As he fled, a non-fatal gunshot hit his upper arm (as kids, we used to be fascinated by the the scar and would pass our fingers over the smooth skin that had healed).  As life happened, an education, a deep and abiding faith in the almighty, a marriage and four children followed – all in a foreign place that eventually became the place of his "official" nationality.

Throughout his lifetime, the hands that now rest so peacefully on top of the comforter, added to living.  They held babies, they disciplined unruly children, they fixed cars, moved an entire household at least three times in memory, and allowed for the flow of life to take them wherever else they were needed.  And now, these hands were resting and they looked elegant, and ready to take a break.

What we see in our loved ones when they finally stop all the doing is how life runs through and with us.  The hands of my father are the hands that nurtured, worked, and did a lot of heavy lifting.  Oh, and before forgetting: the hands also played beautiful piano - untaught, and free flowing. Much like what will happen next.