Because I touched your skin, my hands are holy P.2

Saturday, April 20, 2013

I have been meditating on this thought the last few days.

Because I touched your skin, my hands are holy.

The weightiness of ushering someone into death is something that clings. It is suffocating. Like too much perfume in a small room.

But I can still feel the weight of you in my hands, and that has to count for something, doesn't it?

These average hands have been indelibly marked- you have been carved into them. My palms feel electrified at times. Like something was retained.

Something of you is left in my grasp.

My hands, which have been used for such frivolous things as washing the dishes and tapping away at the computer, held you.

For this reason they should be enshrined. I should have been wearing gloves all of this time to protect your epithilials from dropping off into the dust.

I could have been one of those crazy old ladies that children are frightened of.

Oh, these hands. They touched you. They held your hands and your feet. They reached between your lips and touched your tongue.  I just wanted to touch a part of your body that was functioning properly. These hands held you for your entire life. These hands held you in death, as you stopped.

Stopped beating, stopped breathing. Stopped living.

I often think about the parts of you that I miss. The parts that I will never see again. I don't often think of the parts of me that are beautiful because they held you. The parts that are holy and well formed for loving a baby who was not so well formed.

When I die, my gravestone should say, "These hands held love."

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