Evan holds out his hand, palm down, beside the small purple ornament I’m cradling in mine. On it is his preschool handprint, made with white paint and labeled “Evan 2013” in gold pen. The small paint fingers curl around the glass sphere; his 4-year-old self drew little faces on the fingertips.
Now 10, he marvels proudly at how much he’s grown, and my heart gives a little lurch. I barely remember how that tiny hand felt in mine.
It’s the same hand, I remind myself, a mental pat on the shoulder as I find a spot for it on the tree. There are at least two other homemade handprint ornaments already dangling from branches — preschool and kindergarten teachers know exactly what they’re doing, giving parents a moment in time they’ll revisit with a touch of melancholy year after year.
As kids, our handprints are visible everywhere: on ornaments, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day gifts, walls, windows. Smudgy fingerprints are found on shirts and pants, on art projects of turkeys, snowflakes and flowers.
As we grow, they become significant in other ways, invisible to the naked eye but still on everything we build and so much of what we destroy. They’re all over our homes, our jobs and our loved ones, because we spend our lives using our hands in a thousand ways — helping, hurting — just to carve out a place for ourselves. And the prints we leave behind are, like those little-kid smudges on walls and shirts, not always intentional.
I used to think our souls were unique and our hands were more or less all the same. Now I wonder if the opposite is true: When I drill down into the essence of consciousness, the core of who I am, what I feel — what I am — is not unique, but universal. It is unconditional love, the force of life. My soul is simply a small piece of an infinite Whole, one tiny wave of a vast, endless ocean.
But my hands. They say no two sets of fingerprints are alike, and of course they aren’t. My hands are distinctly mine, both in appearance and experience. No other hands have held all the same people I’ve held. These hands have played a huge role in just about every facet of my unique life — the momentous, the mundane, the charitable, the sensual. They’ve made countless meals, beds, poems, messes. They’ve collected seashells and freckles, signed life-changing documents and wiped away so, so many tears. They’ve held the hands of wobbly toddlers and suicidal friends. They carry and steady and smooth and comfort. They help move these essays from inside my mind to inside yours.
And when I think about my hands, I think about Sarah.
Sarah was one of the first hospice patients I ever visited, a 90-year-old spitfire the hospice volunteer coordinator had warned me was “mean.” That was nonsense. She used to fling shriveled peas from her fork across the nursing home’s dining room when the waitstaff wasn’t looking, just to keep herself (and me) entertained. Sarah was an agnostic Jew born on Christmas Eve, a retired English teacher whose bible was Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. I adored her.
She found favor in me because I was a writer, and I often brought the newspaper to her so she could read my articles and columns. One Saturday I left a feature story I was particularly proud of for her to read; it dug into the supposed link between prayer and healing. When I returned the following week she pulled it out right away and declared it “Amazing.”
The gushing continued for another minute before I realized she wasn’t talking about the article, and likely hadn’t even read it. She was talking about the image that the page designer had used to accompany it — a large photo illustration of two hands pressed together in prayer, against a stark black background.
“This is the best thing you’ve ever done for the paper,” she said, gazing at the hands, which I’d had absolutely nothing to do with. “It’s just so calming.”
Sarah didn’t pray, and she didn’t have an ounce of patience for the hospice chaplain who would swing by her room now and again. But those hands brought her such solace that I eventually framed them for her, discarding my article first like trimming the fat from a roast.
Months later when Sarah was bedridden and growing weaker, I moved the framed hands into her bedroom; sometimes she’d stare at them as if watching a movie.
I’d often read to her, occasionally helping her shift her body when she became uncomfortable. One morning when my hands were gently lifting her legs so she could scoot her backside to a better spot, she looked up at me with the slightest hint of embarrassment and whispered, “I hope you are never in this position.” Then she brightened, her wrinkles deepening with her smile. “But! If you are, I will be the first in line.”
I still think about that promise, which I know, as absurd as it was given the circumstances, she absolutely meant. That was Sarah’s version of “I’ll pray for you” — a far more powerful version, if you ask me. In her dying days, Sarah understood the power of human hands in a way I didn’t yet. She knew that whatever might or might not be waiting for her beyond this life, the whorls and ridges of our own fingertips mark as unique the active, concrete ways we each can be together, be love, while we’re in this one.
It’s a shame, really, that we don’t make handprint ornaments once we grow up. We probably should. At the very least, we should press our palms into a steamy mirror or window every once in awhile, not to document how we’ve grown but to see our lives in the simplest yet most powerful terms.
I am here. And this mark is mine alone to make while I am.
Sarah would have turned 106 this Christmas Eve. I won’t pray for her. But I’ll fold my hands around my sons’ hands, on that day and every day I can — for her, for them and for me. Amen.
