What Washing My Dad's Feet Taught Me

A photo of me washing my dad's feet.

On the 5th of August, my father was involved in a car crash. He had stopped at a red light on his motorcycle, and the distracted minibus driver behind him hadn’t realised on time. The accident left him with severe spinal cord injuries, a fractured 11th vertebrae, and the complete erasure of his ability to move his lower body. As the paramedics wheeled him into the hospital on the gurney, every jolt from the jagged surface of the ground was translated into an agonised scream.

There is a certain jarring, unsettling discomfort that comes with consoling your own parent in pain. It feels like such an unnatural subversion – our perceptions of our parents are typically built upon the foundational, one-way dynamic of the protector and the protected; the carer and the cared for. That is the standard shared assumption. Throughout childhood and early adolescence, there was (more often than not) no reason or external factor to challenge this understanding, so we rarely fully grow out of it. Witnessing my father in true excruciating pain came as a harrowing revelation for me: it was a reminder that he too was a fragile, skin-encased, mixed bag of meat and bones, that he is in fact not the invulnerable higher life form I had subconsciously deified him as and subsequently accepted as the unchallengeable truth. My siblings and I are and will forever be the only people to ever view him as Dad. To the unsympathetic, impartial universe and to everyone else just chugging along by, he is just another ordinary man; just as brittle and weak as anybody, just as indescribably helpless and small in the face of mortality.

He spent the first two days drifting in between painful consciousness and slightly less painful unconsciousness in the intensive care unit, hooked up to an IV cocktail drip of painkillers and blood thinners. One morning – a week after transitioning from the ICU to the orthopaedic unit – he complained to the doctors about a splitting headache. A CT scan showed that the anticoagulant drugs had led to an intracranial haemorrhage, and emergency brain surgery was necessary to save his life. The surgery was successful, but it meant another trip back to the ICU.

By this point, my dad was a barely recognizable man. His half-shaved head revealed a fleshy scar snaking down from his mid-frontal to the back of his right ear. Evenly-spaced medical staples formed the metal legs of a thick, meaty centipede; embedded in the pale grey of his scalp. He was 12 kilograms lighter. Disuse atrophy had manifested itself as a very visible effect in his legs; which have now taken on an emaciated, almost cadaverous appearance. It took him two weeks to be able to move his torso without crying out in pain, and four more weeks on top of that to be able to sit up at a 90° angle.

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Two months had passed since the crash, and I knelt beside my father’s feet. The nurses had slipped a large spreader underneath his bedridden body, hooked him up to a whirring hydraulic lift, and transferred him out of the bed onto a red leather chair. I filled two plastic-lined basins with warm soapy water and set Dad’s feet into the suds. With a damp towel in hand I began to scrub the flaking dead skin and crusty month-old lotion build-up off of my father’s feet. It was methodical work – I would scrub at a sizeable sliver until it sloughed off, dip the cloth into lathery water, shake out the grime, wring it out, move onto the adjacent section of calloused skin, repeat. I thought about the millions of free-floating epidermal cells under my nails. I thought about how the larger pieces of his foot skin resembled shaved Parmesan. I thought about how utterly disgusting it is to scrape at my dad’s feet with the very hand I eat with, but also how helpless, dependent, and vulnerable it must feel to be on the other side of this exchange.

The soapy water slowly turned into a milky white. I stared at the floating particles of foot dandruff whirling around Dad’s ankles; almost like a very gross, slightly fucked-up miniature orbit. I was raised Christian, but I’m fairly certain even little me has always been an atheist at heart (despite my diligent Sunday ventures to church). Omnipotent divinity just never has seemed like a plausible reality to me. However, as a former child, what I do understand is the comfortability of viewing our parents as infallible beings, larger than life and almost godlike in their authority and power. I am a-ok with being a tiny celestial body (a little asteroid, maybe?), gyrating in the comfortable, lukewarm, gravitationally-bound orbital trajectory of the star that is Dad. Even now, my dad seems like the closest thing to a worship-able higher power. But as I stared at his yellowed toenails – unclipped and brittle – I felt the filial reverence loosening its grip; and the reality of his frailty settling in.

My hands moved automatically to lave Dad’s shins as soon as they were done scouring his feet. Despite the slippery layer of soapsuds, his skin was papery and deprived of moisture – almost translucent in places, and seemed to cling to the hardware beneath. The bones themselves jutted out at odd angles and sunk into deep cavernous hollows where there should have been flesh. The knees were knobby and angular with little padding to cushion them, but his ankles bulged out and swelled in unnatural proportions. His leg hair was now sparse and patchy, with bald spots where follicles had given up. I continued to busy myself in my endeavour.

In my head, washing my dad’s feet had opened up a number of potential associations and metaphors: to the parable of Mary Magdalene, the Chinese-Confucian traditions of filial piety, culturally-defined intimacy, masculinity in times of sickness, femininity and subservience, Maundy Thursday, my own relationship with cleanliness and propriety, etc.

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Of physical pain, Virginia Woolf wrote in her 1925 essay On Being Ill that “the merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable.” My father’s sudden disability has rudely orphaned me from the illusion of interminable health, forcing upon me a discourteous, unwelcome reminder of my dad’s atomic fragility.

The religious found rhythm and solace in worship. Poets found consolation in words and in nature. I found comfort in the beeping lilt of the vital signs monitor. After all, the risk of experiencing the universe’s excruciation is regrettably the cost of being alive.