Digital Story Script

TITLE
With a Strong Hand He Shall Let Them Go

DEDICATION
For Hawkins:
Who will never know his grandfather

PART 1

NARRATION: My father’s feet wiggled from side to side, a nervous habit. The cheap lighting splayed in fragments on the silver rails of the bed. The doctor came in saying that he would be in there for a few days. A heart attack, but he was okay. I felt like my role there was as entertainer, storyteller, mime, anything to keep people laughing and not thinking about angioplasties, fluid in the lungs, death. Leaning against the window, my sister looked like a faded curtain in the setting sun. I talked and talked. In the middle of some exaggerated movement with my arms, my hand came to rest on one of the bed rails. My father’s hand was there, too. Our pinkies touched.

QUOTE on black
Dad: It doesn’t matter what you end up doing.
Just be present in your life. You could workout as a cashier at Kmart for the rest of your life…
Feel your body standing by that register,
Listen for the ching as the drawer opens,
Use the time you have with each person that comes through your checkout line to touch them in some way, make their lives better.

PART 2

NARRATION: I had inherited his aversion to physical closeness. My hugs are self-conscious and feeble. By instinct, I almost lifted my arm, freeing myself from an intimacy with my father that I found awkward. On that night, though, I wanted to be close to him and did not move my hand. I kept it on the cold metal frame and felt electricity moving between us, stirring up our shared DNA, consummating our connection as father and daughter. I felt as if I were being pulled and created at that moment, in one small instance, through the contact between us.

QUOTE on black
Me: What do I do if something happens to you?
Dad: Every moment is a new choice. Each breath is a chance to do something good… the best thing possible in that moment. If something happens to me, you’ll do every right thing you can,
every chance you get.

PART 3

NARRATION: I left and got a call at three a.m. from my mother… silence filled the other end of the line… my mom trying to find words that didn’t hurt- the sound of my father’s death. When I got to the hospital, he was laying in the bed, just as I had seen him last… his hand still fixed on the metal rail. I took his watch off, strapped it to my wrist and sat there with my hand next to his, our pinkies in the same place, waiting for the connection between us to return.

QUOTE on black
Me: Dad, what do you want people to say about you when you die?
Dad: He lived in a house by the side of the road and was a friend to man.
He did.
He was.

PART 4

NARRATION: At the funeral, I felt in control and powerful, somehow like my father. I stood next to my sister erect and straight. She stooped in grief to my left, an old woman, showering her feet with tears and moans. I did not know how to reach out to her without poking the fresh bruise of her sorrow- my sorrow. Instead, I looked ahead, placed my hand on the pew in front of me, and waited for our hands to meet.

Patrick Lowery Wheeler
1938-2004