Holding Hands Deeply

A couple of years after my husband was diagnosed, he and I had one of our errand days. The first stop was Costcutters. I'd introduced him to the wonders of a five dollar shampoo while we were on vacation in West Texas and he had put getting a shampoo at the top of our errand list.

We were sitting in the lobby area on blue plastic chairs waiting for the stylist to come out from the back when he murmured something to himself about how if he took his money out of his wallet now and put it in his shirt pocket he'd be ahead of the game. I'd been looking out the window when I glanced down at his hands. He was holding his wallet in both hands, trying to open the dollar bill section with one hand while withdrawing money from it with the other.

His hands trembled and disobeyed. They revolted and wouldn't move the way they were supposed to or as fast as they knew they could. They were thick and slow and wore invisible cement gloves. Once they pulled the six single dollar bills from out of their hidey hole they wouldn't fold the money. They just more or less put the bills on top of each other and pushed them down into the front shirt pocket in a puffy wad and the pocket was bulging from the dollar bills stuffed down inside it. When I looked I felt like getting up from my chair and just walking on home by myself so that I could cry out my tears without anybody noticing.

My husband has beautiful hands. Beautiful hands and wrists. He's always worn a silver and turquoise bracelet on each of his wrists and I've always told him he gets so many compliments on his bracelets because of his beautiful hands and shapely wrists. "Believe me, those bracelets wouldn't attract so much attention on some other guy. " His hands are big and strong-looking and veined and shapely. They look like they could do anything. You used to be able to give them a command and they were there, on the spot, ready to perform. You could ask them if they could fix something and they’d say, "Yes sir, right away sir." They looked like the kind of hands a man's hands are supposed to look like. The hands of Hercules, the hands of Einstein, the hands of fate. He has tender hands, warm hands, and when he has held me, I've felt that he was holding all of me in his hands.

When I first met my husband and we were dating, I was struck by how much he liked to hold hands. Walking down the street, in the car, at the movies. Just touch his hand with your pinkie and he would take hold of it -- and I mean take hold, as in put your hand in his and hold it, with a grip. He's the only man I've ever known who truly held hands deeply. I remember in church one day, he held my hand as we sat in the pew and he began caressing my palm, moving his fingers across it. I could feel his hand holding me all the way from the tip of my toes to the top of my head and I leaned over to him and whispered "let's get out of here."

That's the kind of hands my husband had. The trembling hands I watched in Costcutters looked the same. Still brown and veined and shapely. But they didn't act the same and they didn't perform the same and I hated my husband's new/old hands. I hated them.

When the woman finally came out of the back and called out for her next appointment and I watched my husband slowly walking behind her, ever-so-kindly telling her that he didn't mean to take her away from her lunch, when I saw him walking with such dignity towards a shampoo bowl where someone else was going to shampoo his hair because Parkinson's wouldn't allow his arms to move repetively back and forth over his own head, I wanted to run over to her and tell her that she should be grateful that she was even being allowed to touch the head of such a gentle and tender man. I wanted to tell her he was a treasure and that just because he trembled and he walked slow and moved slow, on the inside, he still had the strongest hands I've ever known and the best hands I've ever held and she should be so lucky that he would ever even touch her with them. Instead, what I did was walk over to where my husband was getting his shampoo, and without missing a beat, slipped my hand into his so that he could take hold -- deeply.