My Mother’s Hands
When I was a child my mother’s hands were unremarkable. She never got her nails done or anything crazy like that. We’re talking the 50’s here, in a small Canadian town, a modest religious woman who would never call attention to her physical attributes. Before she went to bed those hands would set the breakfast table, make a sandwich for each child, slice it diagonally, wrap it in wax paper, stuff it in a brown paper bag, and put it in the ice box, ready for school in the morning. You could say she prepared.
I remember her and Grandma knitting together, the clack of needles, the dance of nimble fingers, scarves and mittens and sweaters materializing from nowhere, to squirrel away against inevitable winters. My mother’s hands would stop knitting and drop into her lap when Perry Como crooned through our small black-and-white television. Grandma would cluck her disapproval without missing a stitch.
Rheumatoid arthritis caught my mother in her 30’s. It took her an hour to overcome morning stiffness. She moved slowly and awkwardly. Her joints were swollen and red hot. She often stopped to sigh, but she didn’t complain. God knew what he was doing, she would say if asked, but hardly anyone did. Treatment was primitive then; side effects swamped any benefit. I went away to college, and every time I came home she had shrunk. Her fingers were crooked, so that when she made a fist, her last three fingers landed outside her palm. My father did up her buttons and opened the jars and cans. He stopped going for walks because she couldn’t accompany him.
In her 70’s she progressed from walker to wheelchair. She stopped doing the daily crossword puzzle and forgot things. She called my third wife by my second wife’s name, and sometimes even my first. When he couldn’t look after her anymore, my father found her a nice nursing home. He visited for most of every day, as he had nowhere else to go and nothing to do. When my mother got tired of him he would talk with the lonely widows in the sunroom.
I flew home to visit my mother before she died. Called Home to Glory was how she put it, with a rare smile. I want to shed this earthly body and be free, she said. I wanted to hug her, or at least squeeze her hand, but I had stopped those simple gestures years ago because she would yelp with pain. Not that we were a physically expressive family anyway. We relied on words, and for the first time she told me that she loved me. I had assumed she did, I guess, but she could have mentioned it sooner.
David Waters is a retired cardiologist who lives in San Francisco with his wife and Kerry Blue terrier. His work has appeared in The MacGuffin, Cleaver, JMWW, Peatsmoke Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Blue Lake Review, and a dozen others. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He teaches prose and poetry at The Writers Studio.