Such Small Hands

Where to start ...

Summer 2005. I'm sitting on a yoga mat in a tiny hole-in-the-wall training center — in a strip mall, between a camera store and a post office — and my heart is opening in a way I seldom let it.

In one sense I'm not doing anything I haven't done thousands of times over the past 29 years. I'm simply holding my wife's hand. In this case, however, she is lying on her back and I am rubbing her fingers, pressing each fingertip with my thumbnail — an acupressure technique we learned weeks earlier.

My heart opens as I feel how tiny her hand is in mine. It's like a child's, and I know she has the same innocent spirit she was born with. At the same time, I see the tiny spots on her skin that give away the secret that she, like me, is already 50 years old.

Then, in my head, I hear the words our instructor spoke when she first met my wife: "Such small hands, but they hold so many people."

Now I'm crying because I know just how true that is.

I see us growing old together, older and grayer than we are now. Already we have been together longer than we've been apart. I think about the moment when her spirit will slip away and it breaks my heart.

Yet in this moment I am more alive and more thankful than I have ever been.