What Washing My Dad’s Feet Taught Me
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…
