Father's Hands

Mother packed a new pair of boxers and a t-shirt to go under the dark wool suit. She wanted to bring dark socks but I insisted on the white cotton socks that he preferred later in life. N. brought a light blue shirt to go under the suit and A. picked out a dusk blue tie with narrow black stripes.

The night my father died a woman from the organ bank called our house. I answer the phone. She asked me if we might want to donate father's legs and arms to help children born with cleft palettes. "The bones and tissues would help children to live normally, heal them," the woman from the organ bank continued through my silence. "We would put in prosthetics. He could still have an open casket."

My first thought was that this sounded like a good idea, that in his death he could help others to live better. It is only a body now, I reasoned, he is not "in it" anymore, there is nothing left he needs from those skin and bones.

But, we had picked out such a beautiful suit for him to wear. And whether or not we could actually see the legs, I wouldn't be able to stop thinking of them cut from him on ice in a plastic bucket. And my stinginess made me feel small and brittle. "No," I told the woman from the organ bank,"This is not something we are interested in doing."

At the funeral home the next day, we saw father laying in the brown glossy casket his head "resting" on a white pillow. It didn't look much like him, though, unless you focused in on a single eyebrow or one of the age spots on his large hands. I would have missed seeing his hands one more time, the oversize thick fingers folded together and resting over his belly, the rosary draped around the knuckles. They were cold now, though, and yellow not like in the hospital when he seemed to squeeze just a little tighter if you asked loud enough.