Reflections for December:The Man from Dachau

Abstract

His wife helps him hobble into the examination room, heavily bent over and frail where once a tall and healthy young boxer juked and jived. He breaks his shuffle and torques to look up at me, eyes as unpaled and piercingly blue as in his youth, nodding and grunting a little to communicate hello before his wife leads him lovingly to the chair. He sits there patient and reticent, both hands resting on his cane, while his wife, spry and witty in her elderly years, communicates for him what seem to be his ailments, evolving problems, and the logistics of the numerous medicines he consumes daily. He looks around the room briefly at times before looking down again, sometimes glancing over at his wife, and when his intermittent gaze falls on me to make eye contact, I suddenly feel intimidated for those brief moments. I find it uncanny how you can tell when you are in the presence of a leader, of a dynamic individual by some subtle manifestation of presence, even if it is buried under layers of medical illnesses and advancing age. He is aware, focusing on his wife and me attentively, taking things in, but at a slant. Among his wife-mediated complaints is a fluctuation over a matter of hours in his ability …