How sad is it that my first thought when I saw the word "touch" was a feeling of creepiness due to the Penn State scandal? A word that should evoke feelings of caring and gentleness can instead conjure up feelings of uneasiness and suspicions of ulterior motives due to all the recent news stories about people who prey upon children.
I pushed those feelings out of my mind and went instead with the secondary good feelings that the word "touch" evokes. Lately my mother has been hospitalized with some serious health issues. Since I'm her primary caregiver, I've been spending a lot of time at the hospital and making important decisions about her care. Seeing her in such a vulnerable and helpless position terrifies me. It's a highly stressful time, in between trying to juggle my daily work life and expecting to help in the delivery of my first grandchild in a matter of days. I want so much to be free to feel only the joy of the childbirth, without the other burdens that are on my mind right now. I can't concentrate on anything lately and I'm highly agitated.
In the midst of all this, I was truly touched by two incidents of touch. A couple nights ago, after I had spent a long evening with my mother in the hospital, I came home both mentally weary and physically exhausted and crawled into bed where my husband was already sleeping. He turned over and hugged me for a long time. He had no other expectations and didn't say a word, he just simply laid there and held me to let me know that he cared. It was the sweetest feeling in the world, and the best therapy I could have wished for at that moment.
The second incident took place at the hospital. My poor 88-year-old mother had been laying for three days in a hospital bed with a tube down her nose into her stomach, her arms restrained so she wouldn't mess with the tube, and nothing to eat or drink. She could only lay on her back due to the restraints. She was completely miserable, and I had noticed that her lips looked very parched and dry, so I brought in some vaseline to use on them. As I was applying it to her lips, she was so grateful. Over and over she thanked me. I sit here with tears running down my face as I think about it. It was such a simple thing for me to do, but it meant the world to someone who was in absolute misery. It took me back to the time that I did the same thing for my dad as he lay dying in the hospital, only in his case he could not express his appreciation. I'll never forget the bittersweet poignancy of either of those moments.
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