Hands. We use our hands so much don’t we? They are an endemic part of our everyday language and hold a special place in our lives. How often have you heard someone say; ‘You’ve got to hand it to her…’ or maybe, ‘Hand it over?’ When a person makes a lot of money, we say they’re making it, ‘Hand over fist.’
When we care for someone, we hold their hands. We caress, and show affection and caring with our hands. They are our working tools, operating everything from a garden spade to a keyboard, whether computer or piano.

Sometimes people are annoying. Some of them are just plain nasty! At those moments when we have to deal with them, we may feel that it would benefit the world if we just throttled them…and our hands would come in pretty useful then, too.

Healers use their hands to practice their craft. And where would artists of all disciplines be, without their hands?

It got me thinking. We take our hands for granted. We don’t even notice them most of the time. Oh, many of us adorn them. We dress them with beautiful jewellery. Some of us tattoo them. For those who choose the commitment of marriage, the third-finger-left-hand wears its symbolic band of gold.

Sometimes we shape and paint the nails. As a teenager, I recall longing for the slender, elegant hands and long, pianist’s fingers some of my friends had been blessed with. Grumpily, I moaned to my mother because I didn’t have that particular asset. Instead, I’d inherited her square palms, and short fingers. Only my nails, like hers, strong and ever-growing, gave me kudos within my peer group.

Today, I can still admire a glossy advert pimping luxurious hand cream or buy into the latest fashion colours from Leighton Denny or Nails Inc, stunningly presented on flawless, beautifully formed models’ fingers.

And sigh at my work-a-day, stubby little offerings.

This morning, while washing my hands, I glanced at them in an absent kind of way, while drying them.

I am getting older. And, naturally, so are my hands. They are no longer the hands of a girl, but I’d barely noticed them changing.

In the bathroom, in the midst of a mundane routine morning, suddenly, shockingly, it hit me;

They looked like my mother’s hands.

My mother passed away in February 2014. It was stunningly quick. The hospitals attempt to correct dangerously low blood salt levels, caused a surge in her brain. Catastrophic brain damage which led to 36 hours in a coma before she slipped away forever. We had precious little time to prepare or adjust.

In Intensive care, those final hours, I kept vigil over the eerily unresponsive shell; the fragile, tiny, empty vessel that had housed my mother’s spirit. I was filled with such longing to hold on to her.

I held her hand.The hand that, a lifetime ago, had enveloped mine, keeping me safe on a thousand childhood walks.

But we couldn’t keep her.
No words, not even those of a writer, can come close to expressing how it felt; that moment when my mother’s heart stopped beating, and mine carried on.

I hung onto her hand until her warmth grew cold.

Months passed and outwardly, to a casual observer, I was fine. I strove to make progress, to move forward from the zombie-like ball of gut-wrenching grief that was me back then.

Loss changes you in a million subtle ways. You are never again the person you used to be.

This morning, gazing at my hands; at my mother’s hands, I was transported back two decades. To a time when, training as a holistic therapist, I persuaded mom to ‘volunteer’ for a hand massage.

Trust me, I needed the practice!

She didn’t enjoy it. She could never relax; couldn’t stand any kind of pampering. My mother was a hard working woman. From a large, ‘Black Country’ working-class family, she was set to work in a factory at the age of 14. Eldest of 6 children with a sick father and stoical mother, she had never questioned her lot in life. Despite having tested second in her school year (she was particularly strong in maths), she spent long days making ferrules. They’re the little gizmos that attach handles to knives. She also worked in the lock industry, on a pressing machine, so common in her town, in the forties and fifties. The Midlands ‘Black Country’ had Yale and Squires, Fletchers  and Josiah Parkes. There’s more information about  this part of ‘The Black Country’ here:- http://www.willenhallhistory.co.uk/society/index.htm

The factories were incredibly dusty, either oppressively hot or freezing cold. They were also nerve-shreddingly noisy, and the working conditions were dangerous. Mom would tell me how her sister, Betty, as a girl of 14, was badly burned by the stove in the factory where she worked. Scarred from the top of her chest down, her nerves never recovered. No compensation or health-and-safety at work in those days. My grandmother worked alongside her daughters. Current thinking seems to suggest that, historically, women stayed home and men worked. That was never the experience of the majority of the women in working class, industrial areas. There, everyone worked.

Mom once caught one of her fingers in the unguarded machine she operated, damaging it for life. I can still see it in my minds’ eye, the way it kinked, bent out of shape at the first joint. In her old age, mom suffered with excruciating arthritis in many of her joints, and her fingers were amongst the worst affected.

Tears come to my eyes as I picture her now; picture those hard-working, scarred, marked, utilitarian hands.

My mother’s unlovely, beautiful hands.