My Parents’s Hands
Sometimes missing my parents feels so overwhelming, I have to break it down into parts.
I woke in the early dark of this morning thinking of my mother’s hands. Her perfect oval nails always as long and sleek as mine were stubby, and peeling. My mother used her nails the way I’d seen other’s use a Swiss army knife. Sharp enough to cut a thing in two, she would use her nails to retrieve small items from places they didn’t belong–splinters from fingers or foreign items in soup.
I have vivid memories of the few times in my childhood when she painted her nails. Her long elegant fingers decorated in thin gold rings that ran down to nails covered in a muted rose color. I think it scared me. We weren’t a family of “special occasions,” and painted nails signaled an out of the ordinary kind of fear. Possibly painted in long careful streaks the day before, Her nails were often the first step. Typically clad in everyday sweats, my mother would eventually emerge from the downstairs bathroom in something like a pleated skirt with a thin gold belt, a blouse with frills and a string of pearls at her neck. There was always and extra gold added to her ears and around wrists. Sitting on the closed toilet seat, watching her wipe a matching lipstick in one a quick slick across her lips, I would feel a rising sort of painic. Mascara on and lid liner on her eyes, my mother became a bolder, permanent marker outline of her already beautiful self. Everytime she walked out the door I worried the world would decide it wanted to keep her, and she wouldn’t belong to us anymore. When my third grade friend Melissa didn’t seem to agree when I declared my mother to be “the most beautiful woman in the world,” I wasn’t offended, I just took it in with the realization that Melissa was was stupid. To a child, blind adoration and a near constant panic of losing person is more a story of love than it ever could be of fear.
My father talked with his hands. The backs of his oversized hands touched with wisps of dark hair that grayed as he aged, he kept his nails short and square. On his left hand his wedding ring, the only jewelry he ever wore, gleamed everyday for fifty anniversaries. Once a year, he’d plunge his finger into his mouth, scratching the ring off between his teeth to peer at the miniscule date inscribed in tiny cursive on the inside. A huge mind that held dates from history with no effort, he was notorious unable to remember anniversaries and birthdays. They found his ring buried in the bed clothes after cancer wasted his body down to less than half his lifetime’s robust body weight. These days I wear his ring on a chain so long around my neck, it sometimes hits my belly button when I sit down. I have the inscription memoried.
My mother sewed, cooked and ate potato chips one by one inexplicably wiping the salt on shoulder of her shirt. My father lectured, read the Times, popping his head up occasionally, “did you hear this, Meg?” To which, even if I had I would reply I hadn’t. I would give anything to hear the sound of his radio announcer quality voice again.
I miss their hands, the way they smelled, the sounds of them. Of course I can only miss them to the degree to which my memory serves me. The brain is largely a information gathering system searching to predict and protect. It’s possible, I will one day have lived more days of my life without them than I had with them. So I concentrate on their hands. I have my parents memorized, and I practice the memories of them every day.
This is greving. This is the work. Memories of the love of the past, carried forward into the minutes of today.
Today, I remember their hands–like a prayer or a vow.
Meghan Riordan Jarvis, MA, LCSW is a psychotherapist specializing in trauma and grief and loss. Meghan provides consultation to companies and organizations looking to create grief-informed workpplaces and works in private practice in Washington, DC. After experiencing PTSD after the deaths of both of her parents within two years of each other, Meghan started the platform “Grief is My Side Hustle” which includes her popular blog, links to her podcast under the same name, and her free writing workshop “grief mates.” Meghan’s memoir “The End of The Hour” publishes with Zibby Books in 2024
