Healing Hands

For many years, my Grandma Dora lived with my parents for half the year. She’d spend spring and summer months with us and head back to Arizona where she lived with my aunt during the winter. My room was next to where my grandma slept, and every night she would sit in her chair saying the rosary before she went to bed. After she was done praying, she would pour herself a glass of whiskey. “It helps me sleep,” she would say without explanation or apology. If you passed by during Whiskey Time she would offer you a glass and tell you to stay and visit a few minutes. “Tell me about your day,” she would say, taking my hand in hers and patting it gently the whole time I talked. I’d tell her about my job and my cute boyfriend, where in the city I went for lunch, how the trains were packed coming home. Like most grandmas, there was no part of it she found uninteresting. She’d never stop holding my hand while I was talking, her soft, old hands with knuckles that seemed larger than they should be for such a small person, and the thinnest layer of skin covering them. Hands that had seen a lot of hard work and hard loss over the years.

My grandma died when she was 97. Up until the end she read the paper every day, had her rosary beads and whiskey beside her every night, and despite a spine that had been crumbling for years from wear and bad bones, rarely complained. While she was at my mom and dad’s house she got a chest cold that turned into pneumonia. I was married then and living two hours away, and when I got the call that she was in the hospital I did not believe that she would die. She had spent a lifetime outrunning so much, but then her clock ran out and we stood around the funeral home and told each other we were grateful for her long life. We were but when we went back to our regular lives we couldn’t figure out how it was possible for the world to keep rotating without her in it.

My mom is now 92. She broke her pelvis a couple of years ago when she fell taking care of a neighbor’s dog, and since then her life has been a challenge that seems unfair for someone, who like her mother, had already seen her share of heartache. She was fatherless at the age of four when her dad dropped dead of a heart attack, she was raised with boarders in the house because it was the only thing my grandma knew to do to keep food on the table for her girls, she buried three children, two of whom were full-term and stillborn, and became a widow when my dad died of a rare cancer when she was 62. For her to lose her fiercely fought independence to move into assisted living months after that fall was a blow that none of her kids wanted, but it was no longer safe for her to live on her own.

My siblings have carried the weight of my mom’s care. I am too far away for daily input and my own hands are full with the weight of Mark’s death. At one point, I asked to be taken off our family group text because I couldn’t handle hearing about her not having a good week, her confusion about what day it was, her frustration of searching for a word that she could not find. You could have easily substituted her name with mine and it would describe me in the months after Mark died.

Last winter and this one, my mom went to Florida for a few months to spend time with two of my siblings who both have second homes there. I went down there for a few days last year, five months after Mark died. I felt broken and pressured to act like I was functioning well in regular life. I smiled, tried to follow conversations, picked up seashells along the beach, sat by the pool, had a martini. I know this because there are photos and yet I don’t know any of it.

My mom has never been one to talk about her losses, to tell you how it felt to have so many hard things happen to her. When I was pregnant the first time, I asked her about her stillborn deliveries. I wanted to know if she felt something or had any warning beforehand. In the one and only time she ever spoke of it to me, she said, “Nobody knew why those babies went full-term and came out dead. Nobody. They wanted to do an autopsy but I worked at the hospital. I’d seen autopsies and I wouldn’t let anybody touch those beautiful baby girls. To me they were perfect and that’s how I wanted them to stay.” I was overcome with sadness for her and the things her generation of women had to stuff down, the unbearable losses that they were never allowed to talk about.

This year was better when I went to Florida. I had many moments of wanting to hide in a closet and cry, but had warily grown accustomed to my role as the leading character in a foreign film that happened to be my real life. One afternoon my mom came into my room and watched me sort clothes to do some laundry before flying home the next day. We talked about nothing important and then she asked, “How are you doing?” It wasn’t a regular how are you doing but how are you doing with your life, the one I can see you struggling with because I am your mother and have known you since before you were born.

“Mom,” I said as I climbed onto the bed, “I’m so tired.”

“I know, Kath, I know,” she said, and the worn hands of her life and loss, the same ones my grandma had, patted my back, said nothing more and everything at once.

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