Trusting my hands has never come naturally. I still remember my stomach sinking when it was my turn at piano recitals. I’m useless at ball sports and until a few years ago the only things I assembled were PowerPoint decks. When I moved to Philadelphia, my dad built my bar stools and gave me step-by-step instructions over Facetime until my mid-century “swoop” lamp swung proudly over my dining room table.
My dad. He had a psychic power over machinery, not to mention complete command of his own fine motor skills. When he was 15, he fixed up a 1929 Model A truck and kept it running until he passed away last year. He was a college soccer goalie, double black diamond skier, and an impressive surfer, all seemingly without formal training. When I was little, he built me a birdhouse and sketched animals from memory — except for buffalo, which he refused to draw because of their illogically meaty shoulders. My dad brought the same intuition and boundless energy into his career as an architect. He designed for our family, our friends, and even my elementary school, which meant that I spent most of my childhood in spaces that came from his imagination.
The joke was my dad had nine lives. We somehow escaped a car wreck in England with only a few stitches and a free ambulance ride, and I’m sure there were big wave escapades that never reached my ears. When I was in my twenties, he fell off his road bike and shredded his left hand, requiring overnight surgery to put three of his fingers back together. Not satisfied with the pace of his recovery, he crafted his own wooden splint to more aggressively stretch his contracted digits.
My dad’s lives started to run out when he began choking on pieces of steak. I went home to San Francisco because of the pandemic, then stayed as each successive treatment failed to stop the tumor in my dad’s esophagus. At first, my dad could take care of himself, hanging his own tube feed bags and keeping track of water flushes in an ancient day calendar I found in my desk. I would sit on the floor of the “feeding room” with him, doing my best to look busy with a Surgery textbook. Sometimes he’d ask me why I was crying — a truly infuriating question to get from a dying parent.
One hospital admission led to another, and my dad came home with a tracheostomy. Along with the trach was a fleet of equipment: oxygen concentrator, suction machine, humidifier. I sat on the floor of my childhood bedroom, willing my hands to find the logical connections between the tubes and plastic connecting pieces that would allow my dad to breathe. I had spent my life building an identity around things I was good at — studying, organizing, managing — and avoiding “hands on” activities that didn’t play to those strengths. Now, I was faced with an essential task in one of my biggest areas of insecurity — putting together machines.
My dad half-watched from the bed where he spent the last three months of his life, too exhausted to help. I wanted to prove to him that I could do it, to show him that I had learned something from watching him work on cars and houses. I also wanted him to know: I’ll be okay when you’re gone.
I set up the machines, and in the months that followed, I learned how to take care of my dad. I could manipulate a catheter to grab a mucus plug 20 centimeters into his airway, cut the perfect gauze for his trach dressing, and deliver crushed pills through his feeding tube. In the midst of tragedy, I began to see my hands as coordinated and efficient.
I desperately needed a project outside of caretaking, something I could pick up or set down when a doctor called or my dad needed his trach cleaned. I turned to knitting, augmenting my basic knowledge with tips from friends and Youtube. Then I pulled our family’s 25-year-old sewing machine out of the closet.
Each time I cast on a sweater or finished sewing a dress, my dad would listen patiently as I talked about the stitches and shapes. He was especially enthusiastic about my more original designs. I visited him in the hospital wearing a yellow dress whose pattern I extrapolated from a blouse. At his bedside in the ICU, I knit a hat with colorwork depicting the Golden Gate Bridge. When he passed away last September, I had several projects that were works-in-progress. Now those garments are finished, and I like to think he was able to imagine the final products.
I miss my dad. Every time a bulb goes out or our car makes a new noise, I wish I could call him for help. But I still knit and sew, and I no longer feel like my dad’s technical talents are completely beyond my reach. Instead, the practice of making connects me to the time I spent caring for him, to his love for designing and building, and to the parts of him that remain within me.
Elena Butler is an MS3 at the Perelman School of Medicine.
Photos also by Elena Butler.
