TOE TO TOE | Elizabeth Mitchell
The second toe on my father’s right foot slung itself over the third toe. They worked their way into this position over time, and their embrace had been sustained for so long, they could not let go. The first time I saw it, I thought it was frightful.
“It’s called a hammer toe,” my dad explained.
“Why don’t you get it fixed?”
“It doesn’t bother me enough.”
Most of the time I didn’t think about that toe, but occasionally, when he took his shoes off, or put on a soft slipper, I’d remember.
When he was ninety-four, his health started to unravel. First it was his lungs. Fluid seeped into them through his stiff arteries, making him short of breath, and his heart just didn’t work as well as it used to.
My father had always been fit. In his younger days, he could run for miles. He was thin, not an ounce of fat, and every day he’d strap on his running shoes, even with that funny toe, and jog. Sometimes I ran with him, sharing the beating of our hearts, our swinging arms, and the in and out of our breath.
As he aged, jogging became more difficult, so he walked. Just outside his laboratory was an arboretum. I brought Etta, my big black Labrador, and Rees, in his stroller, and we shared the road, the whole gang of us, his companions on the glorious path.
Then walking became more difficult. But he walked to his vegetable garden and tended it. He walked through the heavy doors where he worked and tended to that. He walked up the basement stairs of the cabin in Vermont, his arms filled with logs, and tended the fire. He walked up the front stairs to my house and sat with me over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and tended to my heart.
One day he called me.
“I need you, Liz.”
I drove to his home where he lay in bed, his toes at one end, hugging each other, and his arms together, hugging his chest.
“It’s time.”
I called my brothers, and when they arrived, we tended to him, rolling him into the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his hair, perched on his desk chair, his feet too old and sore to make the journey themselves.
Then I lay on the bed beside him, our fingers laced together. He told me I was the light of his life and we stayed like that, stitched together, for a lifetime. That night he died, and I wept, holding onto the beauty of his malformed toes.
Elizabeth Mitchell is an Emergency Physician in Boston where she has practiced for almost thirty years. She has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, JAMA and more. Her writing includes songs, poetry, and essays. She is working on a memoir.