The Farmer

My dad in his beloved garden. He would hoe and trim and pull bugs and piddle in this garden in the middle of the day in the heat of the Tennessee summer well into his elder years. I told him once, “Daddy, will you please just work in the mornings and the evenings instead of the middle of the day? You’re going to keel over dead one day out there.”

His answer? “Baby girl, don’t you see that’s just what I want to do?” I never chastised him again.

During the first year of medical school, one of the most anticipated classes for the incoming students is gross anatomy, ten months of learning the intricate details of the human body through what some would see as a grotesque exploration into its depths.

One of the major tasks set aside for the first week of school is for students to form into lab groups and choose a cadaver with which they will spend countless hours over the following year. The choice is an important one. Choose poorly, and your assignments will be more difficult (and possibly even more smelly). Choose wisely and life might be ever so slightly easier.

Starting with the skin, students open the door to the secrets of the human body one intricate step at a time—skin, fascia, tendons, muscles, blood vessels, nerves. Each component is teased away from the tissue around it with instruments that start out cumbersome but somewhere along the way become natural extensions of the hands.

People often ask me what it was like to look at what once was a human that way, to break them down into their bits and pieces, to read their story written in a language that the person lying on the dissection table would teach me.

The cadavers are bodies donated to science. Some people designate their final wishes in their will. Others are the generous offerings of family. Almost all of them had been elderly when they took their last breaths. Though the spectrum of ages wasn’t wide, the variety of lives lived was. Some cadavers were thin and frail. Others were a bit more fluffy and round. A few had obviously been strong despite their advanced years.

Some teams apparently had some insider information, and they went about making their choices with an apparent plan in place. They seemed to stand confidently by their freshly chosen stations while the rest of us stood slack jawed turning circles trying to choose our own. As I remember it, my group and I eventually just defaulted to a common sense approach and chose the offering of an older gentleman with good musculature.

This strategy proved a good one, and we were blessed with muscles easy to find and distinguish from their neighbors and interesting findings here and there that proved our gentleman was a tough old bird. Honestly, though, creating a mental space between the waxy, cold tissues we were investigating and the human they had been was easy and kept me from dealing with the emotional conundrum I feared before the year started. Until, as the year came to an end, we began to dissect the hands.

We had already progressed through the structures of the upper and lower limbs, carefully finding each and every muscle and its tendon, the nerve that prompted it to action and the blood vessels that supplied it oxygen and nutrients. Our fellow’s skin was tan and tough, weathered to a thickness that told a story while keeping the secrets beneath it. His muscles were thick and ropey, his tendons strong. When these tissues held life, they were active. They moved with purpose, and occasionally I wondered about that movement and activity, what he spent his time doing, how he expended the precious energy of his waning years.

Then we began to dissect the hands. The skin along the back of them was not the tissue paper thinness one might expect of an elderly man or woman. Not even death could completely steal the bronzing the sun had given it. And his palms were calloused—that sort of callous that is acquired in layers over years of hard work. They were the hands of a farmer, and I had not noticed that until time had come to focus solely upon them. In his hands I saw the answer to the question that had been ever present as we had gone about our tasks for the long months preceding, “Why was this old man still so strong?”

He was a farmer. He had spent his years, including his last, standing in the sun and rain and looking across fields or pastures and pondering the needs of his land or his animals. He had pulled and tugged and lifted and carried loads of seed or feed or equipment to help him get his job done.

I could see this story now as I held his hand and read his palm more deeply than his life line, and as I read, that mental space I had been able to create between our waxy cadaver and the man he had been melted away. With it melted my resolve, and I spent the rest of my time working with his hands hiding the tears from my classmates.

In his hands I saw the men of my family—my father, grandfather, and uncle. I saw the hardworking fathers of my elementary school classmates, and I was reminded of all the people they loved and who loved them. One question had been answered, but so many others had been posed, mostly questions about the people he left behind or the people who left him behind.

With time, I have come to read the language taught to me by that farmer in the dialect of the living. Each person I see tells me a tale of their living, their ills, their vices, and their loves. Occasionally, one will even still bring me to tears. I can never know anyone’s full story. None of us can, but I will continue to work to master the language. I owe that much to more than one farmer.

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Unless otherwise noted, all material--written, photographic, and artistic--is the original work of Estora Adams. All rights reserved.