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Illustration by Mary Kirkpatrick
Every morning I step onto a bedside rug made of woven stump socks. It’s a unique heirloom, one of the few things I have that remind me of my father.
A stump sock is exactly what you might envision – a sock that slips over an amputee’s residual limb, giving a snug and comfortable fit into a prosthesis. Actually, that functional description sounds far too pleasant. I can’t imagine slipping what’s left of your leg into a mechanical limb is ever fully comfortable, and suspect it never was for my dad.
My father died from a brain aneurism at age 54. It wasn’t the type of aneurism that took him quickly. He had been living with the diagnosis for a few months, taking blood thinners and waiting for the day of the procedure that would fix the problem. It was supposed to be a fairly routine operation, as far as brain surgery goes, you might say. But he never woke up from the surgery.
He would have been 80 this year and he’s been gone for half my lifetime. I’m 51, with three children who are about to become adults. I am much more present in their lives than my father was in mine. My parents were divorced when I was 10 and, except for brief stints, I lived with my mother and stepfather throughout my teens. Is this the source of the nostalgia that has me writing about a rug? Is there something stirring in me about my kids and their relationship with their father as they transition to adulthood or about the absence of mine as I have stumbled through the process of being a dad?
Absence is probably the wrong word. You see, although I didn’t know it in the early days of my broken family, I was the luckiest kid in the world to have a stepfather who provided the example I needed and supported my mother, my sister and me in ways I can’t count. I feel a bit disrespectful to my dad for saying it, but I have never felt the absence of a father.
But I have felt the absence of him, the man I never got to know as an adult. His life had taken a rough, sharp curve in his early 20s, about the age I was when he died. After injuring his foot in a work accident, he learned his lower leg would need to be amputated. It must have been traumatic but I don’t recall any stories of counselling or other support. (Did they even use the term “mental health” in the 1960s?) All I have ever seen are strange photos of him in a hospital bed and standing with crutches, forcing a smile as if to say: “All good here, everything’s great.”
A couple of years after the amputation, he was told that gangrene had set in and that he would have to have a second amputation higher up the leg. Take that, young man with two young kids and a third on the way.
I was that third child. My sister would follow a year later. Through all this, my dad was able to build a successful construction company. For a few years, things looked fine, at least in the pictures I look at now in old photo albums.
Things weren’t fine. He drank. By the time I was 10, the marriage to my mother was over and we worked through a dizzying few years of bouncing between houses. My two older brothers scattered off to jobs and the start of new lives. My sister and I settled into a new normal, eventually living with my mother full-time.
In many ways, that’s the end of the story. Except for those darn socks.
I remember visiting my father for a couple of days when I was in university, a few years before his death. One evening I was watching a basketball game on TV. My dad happened to be in the room and, in a rare moment of reflection, he commented that he had enjoyed basketball when he was in high school. He never played, he said, but liked going to watch the school team play.
Looking back, that was a Field of Dreams moment for me. I could see my dad in the stands. Young. Happy. Whole. But it was a fleeting moment and a rare one.
After my dad’s funeral, my stepmother asked my siblings and me if there was anything of his we would like to keep. For some reason, I only asked for a pair of old slippers and his drawer of stump socks. I kept one sock, and the others were cut into strips and made into two woven rugs by my grandmother. I stored the rugs away for several years, maybe I thought they shouldn’t be stepped on.
Although my kids have seen photos of their grandfather and heard me tell the odd Grandpa Leo story, they never met him. And like me, they don’t know a lot about him. But they have grown up with the rugs. It was only after I had a home and children of my own that I pulled them out of storage.
In kindergarten, my oldest daughter was asked to bring an heirloom to school for show and tell. The best I could come up with was, you guessed it, the stump sock. My daughter’s teacher sent me a cute, awkward photo of her showing her grandfather’s stump sock to classmates, explaining what it was and telling them about a man she had only seen in pictures – the man with the missing leg that neither of us got to know.
Randy Paquette lives in Calgary.
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