I used to take your hands for granted, Arjun V.K. Sharma writes, but they guided me through the pandemic
Last winter, when your hands became knotted and inflamed from your arthritis, it didn’t help that the notion of “less is more” defined our relationship. Watching how they burrowed under a heating pad and were dulled by pain medications, and how you stretched them, tenderly, I remembered to never pry too deeply—to keep, above all, the boundary between physician and son. But because your hands had always been in motion, in constant occupation, the sight of them stilled in space struck me.
Naturally, you took to organizing boxes upon boxes of them. Our family’s glossy history was fanned out over the dining room table and, passing over them one evening, I picked up a photograph from the rest.In it was the dream that took you away from your first home. Deep River was a sleepy, wooded town on the banks of the Ottawa River. There, you imagined a life where you could feel like yourself in your skin. One that wouldn’t draw bewildered looks from dozens of pale faces.
You got me a job at a nursery heaping burlap-wrapped trees and bags of soil and rock onto customers’ trucks. The other workers knew me as “piano fingers,” meaning that my hands lacked a certain roughness. My palms were not calloused. Tobacco had yet to stain my fingertips.Now, I’m a physician. I carefully inspect hands by the ridges of a nail and the bulge of a joint, the texture of their skin and the tremble of their reaches. They are my gateway into our many inner workings.
I eventually moved back to our home in Scarborough, Ont.—to stave off my own isolation. When I did, I unknowingly became an extra person for you to look after, to worry about. The stress of life under the virus fell disproportionately onto you, Mom.
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