Handy things

   In the nursing home my mother stares at her hands as though she has been shopping for hands. She turns them over, considering.
   She lives on a permanent incline, in her bed or in her chair, immobilized by what is likely a vascular dementia.
   She has thin but doughy hands, as soft as unbaked biscuits. Restless on the arm of her geri chair, my hands look young, compared to hers. And so they should. She is 91 1/2 years old; I am 60.

   I have short-fingered, boxy hands with aggressively trimmed nails. I used to think mine were fancy hands, so agile and smart; but other women my age have creamy porcelain digital elegance. They make my knuckles look like dried-apple granny dolls.
   Compared to Mom's, though, my hands are healthy, decisive and so firm — more firm than I feel. They feel more capable than the rest of me, and I wonder how I lucked into such young hands.
   I notice that feeling. But I don't spend hours just staring at my hands, as my mother does. It's like she's wondering how they attached themselves to her.
 
   The hospice chaplain called last week to remind me he's checking on Mom.
   “Your mother says some wise things," he said. "She just told me, ‘When we grow old, we grow.’ She said that several times. ‘When we grow old, we grow.’”
   I didn’t have the heart to ask if Mom had been studying her hands when she produced this wise observation.
   Sometimes the aides dress her in blouses with three-quarters-length sleeves, and she thinks her arms have suddenly sprouted and are growing right out of her clothes. If her body’s turned so that one sleeve pulls down closer to her wrist than the other, she will ask that arm, “Why are we getting so short?”
   I think she sees her arms as not quite her. And I would say, “Well, of course. She is not herself anymore” … except for the fact that I, also, feel an odd estrangement from my busy hands.
   And I think it might be normal.

   In college I was supposed to read a small psychology book, about bodies. It was an example of phenomenology. Possibly the title was "Things." I didn’t read it, but I do remember the class discussion. Our professor described how the writer sits naked in the bath and looks at his body.
   He notices that the farther a part is away from his head, the more it seems to be merely attached to him.
   His toes are less part of his “self” than are his hands. Hands are less “him” than his eyes are. In fact, only his eyes seem to him very much to be, essentially, him.

   Of course we are our bodies, but parts of our bodies are less us and more ours. We don’t usually notice this, though, unless we are idle or, like my mom, waiting.
   Waiting for whatever comes next.