67

My father died last year at the age of 93. In reality, he’d been dying for the last 15 years and his last breath was a sigh of relief. I had the honor of washing his corpse and dressing him before the undertaker wheeled him away.

His naked body was a map of a life. As I passed the damp cloth over his chest, I could study his quadruple by-pass scar and remember the shock of that heart attack. The length of the scar was a testament to the long recovery. Then the cloth passed over his arm where little white circles marked the points of entry for long steel rods put in after a car accident 50 years ago.

His left wrist was bent and stiff from the same accident. He was left-handed, one of the many things that to my mind made him special. But from that accident on, he had no wrist action. No more overhead shots deep into the corner of the tennis court. Oh, those were beautiful.

The skin, stretched like a Moroccan lantern, thin, translucent, and taut. The extremities so dark, the core so pale. In his youth he had to decide: move to North Africa, or move to America. He decided on America.

The cloth moved over his hip, the first operation to restore his youthful activity. I remembered the Elby’s Half Marathon we walked together, the day before his hip operation. His walk was sprightly and energetic the entire 13 miles. I barely dragged myself over the finish line and I am 27 years younger. Well, I was. Now I’m 26 years younger, and getting younger every year.

The hip operation didn’t work; it didn’t restore his youth. It did make one leg longer than the other.

The cloth floated over his knee, his rock-hard knee looking like a six-inch pipe ell. I thought of the many skills I learned from him: soldering pipes, wiring outlets, double-entry bookkeeping, fearless investing. No kneecap visible. No joint articulation. Only a mass of scar tissue from three failed operations to address the same affliction: fleeting youth. No more shushing down the ski slope on wooden skis with leather thongs.

I dampened the cloth again and wrung it out, carefully fingered his toes. They were long and thin, El Greco toes. The dark, mangled toe nails testified to years of heavy steel-toed boots, jumping into ditches, sliding through manure, walking through high grass at sunset.

Another wring-out. Another wash cloth. Time to dampen the face, the head. The delicate red skin on his bald head, my patrimony to my son. The skin was mottled like the night sky, so many freckles, scabs, scars, and scrapes. He was always knicking his unprotected pate, and the blood, the blood! He ignored it and pulled on an awful orange fuzzy hat, a woman’s hat in its intended life, but he made it his signature hat for at least a decade.

Finally around the eyes, the nose. Deep-set eyes, gallic nose. In his youth he was a pretty, curly-headed French boy. Now he was an American Bald Eagle.

I see my own body as a map of a life. I have a different topography, a lot more rolling hills, a lot less road lines. A map-making still in progress. It helps me to have studied his map. It helps me find my way.