by Lisa Molina
“You have your father’s hands.” I said immediately when the nurse placed your tiny waxy wet body into my arms. Fingers thin and long.
Three years later, I held one of your hands
as you wailed at the shock of pain,
when nurse pricked one of those fingers;
The blood soon revealing your body
was full of leukemia cells.
I held your hands throughout the
thirty-eight months of chemotherapy,
clumps of your hair falling into my hands
as I would wash it, until none was left.
I felt those tiny hands as fists banging on my chest because you were so furious that this “medicine” that was going to make you well made you feel so sick.
I felt those hands squeezing mine across the table
eight years later when the cancer returned.
“Mom, I don’t want to die. Tell me I’m not going to die. Please! Tell me I won’t die.”
I sat caressing your hand while nurses and a doctor worked furiously to revive you while you lay unconscious in septic shock, nearly dying, remembering the day I first saw and
held them through a blur of tears.
And I held those skeleton-like hands two years later when the cancer was now in your brain;
And the umbilical cord blood of an unknown
savior child was transplanted into your withering, nearly-dead body….
resurrecting you.
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You’re twenty-four now, free of the grip of cancer.
We haven’t held hands in many years;
But I look at them often, hoping you don’t notice;
And I smile softly as I watch those beautiful, long-fingered hands you inherited from your father, pulsate with movement and Life.
And I can still feel them holding mine.
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