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Suddenly my world became simple again.

My Father's Hands

There was only one important thing—my child. I began to understand the basic rules that he had spent twenty-five years trying to teach me. He made me believe I was strong enough to make my own decisions and take care of my child and myself. Because he had never lied to me, I believed all that he told me, and I did survive and finally became fully adult. Shortly after my dad held his great-grandchild for the first time, we got the diagnosis that he had a 50 percent chance of surviving the next few years.

He put every ounce of his strength and will into fighting the disease.

My Father’s Hands

He never ceased to be positive, and he was always trying to make sure all of us were okay, even while his body was slowly wasting away. His family rallied around him. His hands more often held a cane now than a tool. He smiled and said that I knew enough.

Skip to Main Content Area. Then I married, and my daughter was born. In order to protect the rights of the copyright holder, no portion of this publication may be reproduced without prior written consent. More stories from our partners. More Chicken Soup for the Soul.

What is Chicken Soup for the Soul? When it was over, he stood before the window and slowly turned the pen he still held in his hands-gazing, unseeing, down the mountainside. I went down to the spring house that afternoon and wept for a long while. Eventually, he found another cotton-mill job, and we moved into a mill house village with a hundred look-alike houses. He never quite adjusted to town life. The blue of his eyes faded; the skin across his cheekbones became a little slack. But his hands kept their strength, and their warmth still soaked through when he would sit me on his lap and ask that I read to him from the Bible.

He took great pride in my reading and would listen for hours as I struggled through the awkward phrases. Once he had heard "a radio preacher" relate that the Bible said, "The man that doesn't provide for his family is worse than a thief and an infidel and will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Other times, he would sit at the kitchen table leafing through the pages as though by a miracle he might be able to read the passage should he turn to the right page. Then he would sit staring at the Bible, and I knew he was wondering if God was going to refuse him entry into heaven because his hands couldn't write. When Mother left once for a weekend to visit her sister, Dad went to the store and returned with food for dinner while I was busy building my latest homemade wagon. After the meal he said he had a surprise for dessert, and went out to the kitchen, where I could hear him opening a can.

From My Father's Hands

Then everything went quiet. I went to the doorway, and saw him standing before the sink with an open can in his hand. He walked out and sat on the back steps, and I knew he had been embarrassed before his son. The can read "Whole White Potatoes," but the picture on the label did look a great deal like pears. I went and sat beside him, and asked if he would point out the stars. He knew where the Big Dipper and all the other stars were located, and we talked about how they got there in the first place. He kept that can on a shelf in the woodshed for a long while, and a few times I saw him turning it in his hands as if the touch of the words would teach his hands to write.

Years later, when Mom died, I tried to get him to come live with my family, but he insisted on staying in his small frame house on the edge of town with a few farm animals and a garden plot.

His health was failing, and he was in and out of the hospital with several mild heart attacks. Old Doc Green saw him weekly and gave him medication, including nitroglycerin tablets to put under his tongue should he feel an attack coming on. My last fond memory of Dad was watching as he walked across the brow of a hillside meadow, with those big, warm hands - now gnarled with age - resting on the shoulders of my two children.

He stopped to point out, confidentially, a pond where he and I had swum and fished years before. That night, my family and I flew to a new job and a new home, overseas.

Three weeks later, he was dead of a heart attack. I returned alone for the funeral. Doc Green told me how sorry he was. In fact, he was bothered a bit, because he had just written Dad a new nitroglycerin prescription, and the druggist had filled it.

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Yet the bottle of pills had not been found on Dad's person. Doc Green felt that a pill might have kept him alive long enough to summon help. An hour before the chapel service, I found myself standing near the edge of Dad's garden, where a neighbor had found him.