Holding Hands with a Ghost?
Angela Bonavoglia
Shuffling forward in blue booties on the cold stone floor, I made my way with my surgeon into the bowels of New York Hospital, to one of its Operating Rooms. We were headed to the bed where she would make the first slice into my tender flesh.
I had a colleague at the time, a bit of a New Age psychologist, who knew how terrified I was about the biopsy. I didn’t know anybody who’d had breast cancer. I was 39 years old; my body was a seat of great ambivalence and consternation for me, feeding it, exercising it, owning it. I was so afraid to have it cut into like that. The psychologist asked me, what would make you feel better? Out of nowhere came this response: Having my father there. Now, that would be my dead father. The father who had not died yesterday, last year, or last decade but when I was 7 years old.
And I didn’t just want him there, in the OR. I wanted him to hold my hand.
She asked me to think of him, to let him know. I did, but I wondered about her mental health.
After the walk down that long hall into the dank depths of the hospital, we arrived in the OR. I was helped to climb onto the stretcher. My teeth chattered. I trembled.
Meanwhile, the surgeon was doing whatever it is that surgeons do to get ready to cut when I noticed, sitting to my left, to the left of the stretcher, close to me, was a young man.
I said, “Who are you?”
He said, “I’m a resident.”
“Oh,” I said, a bit confused.
He said, “I’m going to be here throughout the procedure.”
“You are?” I asked, surprised.
“Yes,” he said.
I could feel my fear begin to melt away. I kept my head turned in his direction, staring at him, both of us smiling.
Then, he did something I did not expect at all: He took my hand.
As I lay there, my hand nestled in his, the anesthesia was administered. Then, it all went black.
When I came to again, in the recovery room, the young man had disappeared. That lump was benign.
In the decades since, after more biopsies and actual breast cancer, I have always been grateful to that young resident who was there for me on the first cut of my journey. His reassuring presence stuck.
Of course, there have been moments when I wondered, was that young man really there? Had others seen him? Had it been a human hand in mine? Or had I been holding hands with a ghost?
No matter. What I do know is that at the moment when it most counted, when I awaited the fall of the knife, when my own mortality became real to me, the father I had called back to help, to hold my hand, was there.
Angela Bonavoglia’s work has appeared in many venues, including Ms. (former contributing editor), the NY Daily News, Chicago Tribune, The Nation, Salon, Women’s Media Center, and the Huffington Post. She authored The Choices We Made: 25 Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion (classic oral history, foreword by Gloria Steinem) and Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church. Among the collections in which her work has appeared are 50 Years of Ms.: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution (Knopf, 2023) and Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press, 2023). www.angelabonavoglia.com