The shop teacher pulled me aside after class. 'Your dad's hands shake when he holds a chisel,' he said. I was fourteen, embarrassed, denied it.
Years later, in a clinic forty miles from our exurb, a neurologist said the word 'essential tremor.' Mild then, but progressive. You sat there, hands folded.
I thought about the shop teacher, how he saw it before any of us did. How he never brought it up again, just handed me a program from the school play you'd attended — your name still in the margin, where I wrote it.
That day the tremor was named, I made a choice I didn't recognize until now. I didn't run toward a career, I ran toward the fragile quiet of being useful.
Divorce taught me I stayed too long in houses that weren't mine. But hospice work taught me that staying anyway, at the end, was the only detour that counted.
The tremor never had a cure. But it had a name, and names matter. I think of the shop teacher every time I hold a patient's hand steady.