~
Reach out and touch,
somebody’s hand,
make this world a better place,
if you can
~
1 Play
Not long after my family moved to Australia, I became friends with a little girl who lived across the street. We were both about seven, and both ABBA fans. We had posters stuck on our bedroom walls and listened to the albums so many times that we learnt all the words of all the songs by heart. I remember a little game we played that involved touch. We’d take it in turns and use our fingers to trace letters or drawings on each other’s backs. Sometimes I’d guess correctly; she often predictably wrote the names of our favourite songs. Honey Honey. Hasta Manana.
The soft touch of her fingers made the skin on my back tingle and made me glow warm inside. And it was lovely to do the same back to her. I liked to create an endless pattern like the infinity symbol. I knew that felt nice. Sometimes I tried to make it trickier by drawing a cat, or a house. It was innocent play. Intimate, I guess, by definition, but it was just natural to touch and connect. I remember feeling a closeness with her and looking back I think that filled a hole inside when I was just a little girl in a strange new country. In all the years since then I’ve never heard of anyone else playing that game. I wonder if any of you did?
2 Reaching
My adorable baby girl arrived 12 weeks early and weighed only 933 grams. For weeks she just slept in a neonatal ICU incubator hooked up by electric probes and wires to beeping monitors, and had a thin gastric tube taped in through her nostril. Today it’s well documented that skin-to-skin contact with your newborn baby is important for bonding, but because of Hope’s precarious hold on life, we were denied that closeness. I sat there day after day and reached my arms through the round holes just to hold her miniature hand in my fingers and lightly stroke her face, and the wrinkly pink skin of her body.
As she grew stronger I was allowed to do physiotherapy with her, important because she couldn’t move. I circled her legs like riding a bicycle, twisted them gently from side to side to help massage her internal organs and to improve the blood flow in her back. I wasn’t able to nurse her for a long time, but my touch was vital to nurture her body and soul and enhance our bonding. My hands were channels through which my love for her flowed.
3 Care
My mother-in-law was diagnosed with Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer, the cancer that has no mercy. One of the things I did for her during her last months was urge her to have massages. At 82, Jo had never had one before. She was so reluctant to. Almost scared of the thought of it. Going for a massage wasn’t as accessible and acceptable in her day. How many people, apart from those that have gone through a trauma and just can’t, are still scared or intimidated or perhaps even repulsed by the touch of a stranger? It took some work but I convinced her to give it a try and I remember that first time when I held her arm and guided her through the doors of a lovely spa in Byron Bay. Vanilla and orange candles, mellow lighting, yoga music, quality cotton sarongs on the massage table, and full respect given to her aging and dying body. When she emerged an hour later, she wiped a few tears from her hollow cheeks, and she looked more peaceful than I’d seen in all the twenty years I’d known her. She said, “Why didn’t I ever have one before? It was so lovely to feel hands on my body.” Jo had experienced what we all know the science has shown: the release of oxytocin and the reduction of cortisol and all that. More tangibly, she felt better because she’d received the tenderness of caring touch.
And then, just weeks before she died, when she couldn’t go to a spa anymore, I was humbled and inspired when a niece visited her with a big bottle of moisturising lotion. With a gentle and reassuring touch, Annette rubbed the lotion onto the fragile dry skin of Jo’s arms and legs and hands and feet.
4 Cradling
Ten years ago I went with my choir friends of all ages to Uganda. We visited an orphanage. Almost all of the babies there had lost their parents to HIV/AIDS. A group of us sat on the concrete floor, with our backs to the bare concrete walls, and held their tiny bodies. One little boy was sick, he was burning up, and I held him for hours, gently wiping his brow with a wet washer, rocking him and softly humming songs.
We weren’t replacement parents waltzing in to take over for a few days only to disappear the next morning, disrupting their lives or their parcels of trust in the process. No. We were warm-blooded humans there to give them love. There weren’t enough staff or hours in the day for each baby to be held for as long as their parents would’ve held them, had they been alive. We were strangers who’d come from a completely different background, different world really, and we simply shared the gift of human touch.
5 Healing
The following year I had a nasty little surgery and the pain – to go to the toilet of all things – was unbearable and far from sexy or romantic. My man, my gorgeous sexy romantic love, cradled me in his arms and literally sang me a lullaby. He soothed my brow softly with his lips, he tenderly brushed my hair away from my eyes with his fingers and rubbed my temples to help my stress disappear. Harley held me so tight that I knew I wasn’t alone, that I could endure and overcome any pain. I felt truly loved.
A short while after he died, a friend gave me the gift of a Hawaian massage. Lomi-lomi is an incredibly nurturing, flowing and cradling massage style. I highly recommend it. I cried a little in the middle, there’s just something about genuine human touch that can ground and centre, reassure us and give us strength.
6 Connection
Here on Meno, and already in my fifties, after full days sharing life under the sun, cooking and cleaning and hosting our guests and swimming in the ocean and feeding cats, Made usually held my hand as I went to sleep. Often he’d also drape one leg over both of mine. Made grew up in a family that touched a lot. His mum and dad and their seven surviving children slept huddled together in a space probably no bigger than the bedroom I slept in, alone, when I was a kid. For Made, being alone, or separate from others, was almost uncomfortable for him.
In Indonesian culture, public displays of affection between couples are not the done thing, and yet touch between people is very common. People and families often sit and walk arm in arm. Almost everyone gives massages too, and they have complete faith in its healing and connective power. When I first met Made’s family, his 5 year old grand-niece Ayu was proud to give me a shoulder and foot massage when we all sat around on the floor after eating our nasi campur. And she was good at it!
When we visited Made’s mum in the mountains, we’d always bring her a new bottle of liniment. Made would rub the oil firmly and mindfully into her overworked and tired arthritic legs and feet. He’d even cut the toenails on her dirty feet, lovingly, when she couldn’t reach them. Grandparents here teach little children how to massage and, in turn, they grow up to instinctively massage each other, including their elderly parents, to soothe away physical and emotional pain.
7 Skin
My gorgeous little niece had only been born a few hours and my sister handed her to me. It was my turn to wrap someone in my arms again, and I was blessed to cherish that moment that lasted a small eternity. I laid on the hospital bed, and cradled little Ella to my chest as she slept soundly. I could feel her heart beating against mine, and her tiny breath flowing over my chest. This tiny little human who’d only just come out into the world and felt air on her own skin. I wished her a life in which she would always be held, and I think that moment created a kind of special bond that has continued between us.
8 Lifeline
A Covid year of not hugging. Not touching. Everybody afraid. Afraid of the virus, afraid of other people, afraid of getting too close, afraid of breaking rules, afraid of the vaccines. Thank goodness I got to spend a few months playing with my awesome little man who doesn’t understand any of the madness. We played and wrestled and snuggled, and I touched him all the time, as grandparents can do. For my once-again grieving soul, Elwyn’s laughter and tickles lightened my load and helped me keep my light on; and his little hand in mine was a lifeline.
9 Hugs
The last time I had a hug was three months ago. My island friend Bernie saw me the day I returned from the UK, and she broke the rules to give me the biggest and warmest bear-hug ever. She just held me, one human with another, pleased to see each other, glad to be alive and ok-ish despite our losses and struggles and the distance between us and our people around the world.
~
sometimes a hug is the answer,
even if the question is unknown
~
Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever walk along a beach holding someone’s hand again. I know loss and Covid compound my musings, but some days I wonder also how I’ll manage to navigate the loneliness and absence of daily touch in the coming years. And I wonder when people (those not in Australia and NZ) will sit close to each other again. When they’ll hug again.
In yoga I press my palms and fingers together in anjali mudra, or the prayer position; it’s a touchstone that helps me feel connection within my own body. I feel the truth in my heart and I feel immensely grateful for a million things, including the ability to touch, to feel, to give and to receive. I pray I won’t die alone, like so many people did in the last twelve months (including my aunt in Holland) when their loved ones weren’t allowed to even sit beside them, let alone hold their hands. And I pray that when this wretched pandemic is over, those of us with no other humans in our homes or ‘bubbles,’ will once again embrace the magic of touch – a massage, a hand held out, a pat on the back – and the greatness of big, warm, life-giving bear-hugs.
