My hands have faded henna on them.
The original design is barely discernible now. What remains looks less like a pattern and more like traces of something that used to be there.
There is a burn on my right wrist from touching the top of the oven while taking out Greek chicken. I couldn’t see it when it first happened. The henna covered it. Now that the henna has faded, the burn has appeared.
I cut my nails a few days after coming home from Chicago. I had to go back to work, and shorter nails are easier to keep medical-facility clean.
When my nails are short like this, my hands look like my grandmother’s.
I remember her hands rolling out pasta dough. Weeding the garden. Moving along the beads of her rosary.
I don’t remember much about my mother’s hands. She didn’t create things with them. She didn’t hold our hands or brush out our hair.
But I remember her placing her hands over mine to teach me how to milk a goat.
There are two scars on my right hand, beginning beneath my pointer finger and running partway toward my wrist. There is nerve damage there, too.
Those came much later.
I punched a window after Becca was killed.
Before that, though, there was so much life.
There were the first times I held each of my new children, holding them close. Smoothing lotion over new skin. Carefully bathing bodies that seemed impossibly fragile. Smoothing a crinkled forehead until it relaxed beneath my fingers.
Their tiny fingers curled around mine.
Later, I held their hands while they took unsteady steps beside me. I wiped away tears when they fell, or when they were simply sad. My hands made their dinners and then taught their hands how to hold a utensil.
I brushed Becca’s hair, braided it, tied ribbons in it for school picture days. I packed her lunches. I sewed Baby Laurie back together over and over because she was Becca’s favorite, and loving something that much meant eventually wearing it out.
I still have Baby Laurie.
I walked my children to school on their first days and felt their hands slip out of mine as they went into the classroom.
There were years of school projects spread across tables. Birthday cakes made and decorated. Christmas presents wrapped after they had gone to bed.
For a while, my hands did almost everything for them.
And then, little by little, I taught their hands how to do things for themselves.
My fingers have entwined with a lover’s. My hands have known the warmth of another body beneath them, touch that had nothing to do with tending or caring for anyone.
Touch simply because I wanted to touch.
Over the decades, my hands learned to make gardens grow, animals heal, food for those I love. They repaired bikes when the kids jumped a curb. They made scarves and mittens, bouquets of flowers.
My hands learned to repair broken toys. Ripped clothing.
My hands have worked.
Cutting and moving firewood to heat my childhood home. Cleaning the barn and milking the goats. Carrying dishes of food to tables in a restaurant. Getting blood from the tiny hind leg of a kitten. Preparing food for those who are dying.
There have also been things my hands could not fix.
My daughter’s first broken heart. The disappointment when the boys didn’t make the team. The confusion they felt when their father went to prison. Becca wanting a relationship with her father that I could not create for her. The pain of losing their childhood dog to old age.
There were hurts a mother’s hands couldn’t reach.
When my hands couldn’t fix what was causing them pain, they could still soothe them.
Hold them. Stroke their hair. Make hot cocoa with whipped cream and sprinkles. Draw with them while we talked.
The last time my hands touched my daughter while she was alive was on a Thursday afternoon.
We stood in the front yard together. She wrapped her arms around me tightly, and I held onto her.
Three days later, my hands were pressed against window glass as my daughter lay on the other side, dead.
The glass was cold because the morgue was cold. I pressed my palms flat against it as if I could push through with sheer will.
“She’s not dead,” I screamed.
I thought I could see her breathing.
Someone beside me gently removed my hands from the glass and turned me away.
The next time I touched my daughter was also the last.
It was at her viewing. She lay on a gurney because I could not bear to see her in a casket. She was covered with her Care Bear blanket, the one I had pulled beneath her chin hundreds of times when she was young.
I lifted the blanket from her feet.
My daughter always had cold feet. I knew they would be cold now, and I wanted to warm them.
So I held them in my hands.
When I wasn’t holding her feet, I stroked the hair on her head.
When the viewing ended and everyone had left, I asked for time alone with my daughter. I wanted to be the last one with her.
I slipped the nightgown down from her shoulders so I could see the autopsy scars. I needed to know what her body looked like before she was gone.
I ran my fingers down both sections of the Y-shaped incision.
I can still feel how the sutures puffed up her skin.
After that my hands felt useless.
They lay in my lap, still.
For a long time.
And then they began to draw.
Not pictures. Shapes. Twisting shapes with dark shading.
I didn’t fill pages. I filled entire sketchbooks. Multiple sketchbooks.
Night after night, I sat on the couch and drew those shapes. I wasn’t trying to make anything in particular. I just kept drawing them, and the longer my hand moved across the paper, the calmer I became.
Someone once told me they looked like bodies wrapped in shrouds.
I wasn’t drawing bodies. I wasn’t drawing anything.
I was simply drawing.
I still have some of those sketchbooks.
Others have disappeared through the multiple moves I’ve made since Becca died.
But I kept drawing.
Eventually, the twisting shapes became recognizable images. I drew motherhood. I drew grief.
And then there was still a life that had to be provided for.
The boys were still here.
My hands went back to work.
Eventually, they began doing small things that weren’t necessary.
I knitted.
I cared for houseplants instead of an entire garden.
I started putting on makeup again.
Small things.
Things that didn’t keep anyone alive. Things that didn’t earn money or fix what was broken.
Things I did simply because I wanted to.
I went from lead pencil on white paper to colors on canvas.
I filled journals and wrote poetry because I didn’t want to forget anything, especially the life we had shared.
My hands dabbed perfume onto my skin.
They chose a shirt because the fabric felt silky beneath my fingers.
My hands can still reach for the things I desire.
Age has not changed that.
They can hold a grandchild’s hand. Roll dough for a pie. Pick up a pastel and trust themselves to make a good mark.
As I hold my hands up in the sunlight, I can see memories there.
I see ancestry in my hands. There are scars that bring me back to a different time. Cobalt blue pastel remains beneath my nails from the water I was working on yesterday.
These hands have held both emptiness and fullness.
Today, my hands wan to learn. To experience. To create.
They reach.
