~the first time i touched my dad's feet
a hospital foot massage & the circle of life
* this is a repost from my other stack, BULLETIN 88. apologies to dual subscribers. but inspiration only strikes once a year, apparently, and i figure this is numinous-pertinent.
it was after his second procedure at the hospital, through the white pilled sheet suspended over his toes.
that dose of chemotherapy had sent his usual 6-foot straight line of a body into a thin curve under the blanket, curled up around his liver like a potato bug intruded.
i remember the bouncy hospital orderly who had wheeled him gently but quickly around the eight sharp corners towards the Recovery Room saying firmly, ‘Yeah, your dad’s in for a rough night.”
⏤⏦
people think pain is supposed to have a conclusion. it can drone on, like a conference or award shows, but even those are meant to end. it’s the elusive temporality of things that make them feel important to us, not the permanence. i think it’s the same with pain: we’d like it to end, give it some meaning, find some relief. and for those of us not in the ring, we contest the sport but we never touch it. we watch trembling from the nosebleeds.
⏤⏦
that night, my dad writhed and twisted his blankets up into eddies as he tried his best to find the most comfortable position to surf out the pain. he hadn’t eaten anything solid in hours. the cavity of his body was like a rock in a landslide.
all i could do was clutch his feet through the fabric and comb some comfort into the long toes and connective tissues of his soles, which are the blueprint for mine. woody, skinny, rigid, incredulously arching, bending sometimes but not often enough. i stumbled through the process: what did i learn in school for this? why didn’t i bring my acupuncture needles? will the herbs i brewed for him be enough—can he drink it now? will it even help? will it make him worse?
there is a point where the mind’s narrative no longer conveys what it needs to. it is then that the language of the body takes over. finger pads become the messengers: pressure, initiating, releasing. affirming.
i touched my dad’s feet for the first time in my adult life using a language we had never spoken before, a language of life affirmation that i learned on my own.
pinching the toes: affirmation through touch is something i never grew up with. all of us in the household stood apart, commandeered by an overwhelming sense of distance hard-fought. rooms were rooms, doors were doors, and our bodies were distinctly shaped by one angry argument, the single idea of i am not you.
heel smacking: reshaping the scaffolding of the mind, remoulding clay things with water, or maybe with a beating. martial arts and medicine practice have taught me that there is no knot that can’t be undone, there’s only a limit to the time we have to undo it. you can peel the garlic finely to get to the meat or simply smash it if the wholeness matters less to you than the ability to thrive. through my dad’s illness we have begun to breathe again.
circles on the soles: through the practice of the body, we are releasing to the earth what is no longer necessary. namely, death’s desire for loneliness, for disconnect, for fatal disintegration. this affirmation is an act that is committed to again and again, and i have only learned to embody it by loving myself anew each day. this daily qigong, the recycling of energy, allows the love to remain, for love to uphold integrity when one body fails. our relationship is no longer linear, it is a circle.
⏤⏦
according to my dad, that second procedure was more painful than the first but less painful than the one that followed. a 6 out of 10 on the pain scale, he told the young research assistant who dropped by with his clipboard.
"but you said the last one was 6 out of 10,” he replied nervously. “so which one was more painful then?” my dad, sitting upright, crossed his feet on the hospital bed and shrugged in his hospital gown, looking at me. it’s difficult to quantify when everything feels new.
~numinous