the power of touch

Sometimes I take out memories, and just think about them, about what they meant then, what they mean now.

When my mother was lying in the hospital, trying to recover from the heart attack that led to the stroke that caused her kidneys to shut down, her lungs to fill and eventually, her death, I was lucky enough to get to be with her, at least some of the time. It took nearly two weeks for death to finally claim her. In that period of time many moments stand out as extraordinary. The most intimate moment between just she and I, perhaps any time since maybe infancy, was the night I was alone with her, and massaged her leg.

There was less than half of the leg left, she'd endured so many amputations in that last ten years, and I never touched her before that. I wondered if massage would help increase the circulation that she lacked, the absence of which led to each successive operation. But I didn't live near, I saw her four times a year or so, and she had a husband. It wasn't really my "place" to offer to rub away the pain.

I suppose I was in denial all those years. The last nights in the hospital made me understand that all the people who were close around her those last years were not there out of concern for her, but out of their own needs. Needs which she, even in her compromised state, filled without complaint.

But she was lying there in a hospital bed, unable to move, unable to breathe without assistance, denied even ice chips for fear of aspiration, and the people who'd surrounded her in her years of need were down the hall in the lounge, eating pizza and having a party.

I stayed in her room. It was cold. So cold. Probably sixty degrees, and she was still feverish. The medication they'd given her to regulate her heart rate had the side effect of something thermal, overheating her. The nurses knew this and dialed the thermostat down as low as it would go. But we were dressed for summer, and easily chilled. They gave us blankets to drape over our shoulders.

She moaned; the pain from her tubes, her afflictions surely awful, but it wasn't that. It was the phantom pains that woke her crying in the nights. Pain in the limbs whose circulation had shut down and killed the tissue.

I can handle crises. I don't fall apart when immediate danger threatens, or when someone is hurt. I forgot all about my denial, and went to her. Her leg was bare; she'd pulled the hospital gown up as high as she could to feel the blessed cool air. I'd never really looked at it, and when I placed my hands on the skin of her thigh, she quieted. I kneaded the muscle, soft and pliable, more like the feeling of those water tubes we get at conferences with advertisements, to handle for stress.

The connection was immediate. I knew that it felt good to her, to be touched, to feel my hands working the pain from their memory. I didn't mind, and unlike the way my fingers get when I'm giving a massage I'm not really in the mood to give, I didn't tire. I didn't stop until the nurse came in to do a breathing treatment, and to sedate her so she could rest.

Before I left the room, she took my hand and squeezed it.

I looked in on her the next morning, but they'd decided her best chance was to be drugged to a state of unconsciousness, so that they could perform the next procedure needed if she was ever to come home. Her husband gave consent. His right, his responsibility. She never woke from that state, and a week later we had to turn off the machines.

I wasn't the last person to touch her, there were people in and out the whole week as she slept, but I'm pretty sure I'm the last one whose touch she knew. No one else was with us, we didn't speak, but the power of touch between us reaffirmed a connection that isn't explainable without the experience of it. Parents know it, it is the same one that settles a child's nightmares when he doesn't quite wake up, the

I will always wonder, if I'd been there more, if I'd been there to touch her legs, rub her feet before the doctors began their surgical solution, could her life have been better? Could it be so simple?

This isn't about my mother, or me for that matter, but about the power that humans hold in their hands with such simple things. A soft voice, a kind word, a simple touch, given without obligation or expectation. It astounds me really.