Her skin in my hands
My daughter thinks “I’m weird” to use her exact choice of words. Yet, I find a certain level of comfort in having pieces of my mom’s skin tucked away between her own jewelry in my drawer. They are perfectly placed in a ziploc bag laying on a paper towel I found in the bathroom next to her along with three short pieces of her hair.
I found her dead on October 20th, 2020. She had been dead 3–4 days, no one knows exactly. It is an image you can’t erase. Her legs and feet were purple against her light colored skin laying on the ground, her left hand hanging from her side against the tub. Her pants were down yet her head and part of upper torso were leaning inside the tub. Her head was covered by the sparkling sage shower curtain I bought her a few months before. It was clear she did not die on that tub, but rather her body eventually fell over.
The kids and I went over to see her that summer day just a few months before. When I went into the restroom I noticed she did not have a shower curtain, yet it was clear she took baths in there. I immediately went to Walmart and selected this one. I knew she liked that light green. She had used that color to decorate her old condo in Orlando. I also knew she liked sparkles. It was perfect for her. I had Gaby installed it that same day. She loved it, she said.
It was that same sparkling sage shower curtain that shielded me from seeing her face when I found her. It was as if somehow the universe protected me with that sparkle as she laid there dead.
Her left hand is embedded in my head. I have a secret Love for hands. It started when I was a child in 5th grade; I was 10. My mom was a hand surgeon and I remember the nights she practiced on my hands how she would perform her surgery the next day. I would sit next to her on her bed right in front of the tv, usually the Golden Girls, Kojak, or Charles Angels was on. I would give her my hand for her to draw. Her selection of my right or left hand depended on what hand she was performing the surgery on the patient the next day. She would take a pen and draw the incisions, explain to herself out loud how she would go in and by the end of our mockup surgery, my hand looked like a treasure map with all the minute lines all over it yet unlike the treasure map the X was right where she would make the first cut. I liked it when the ink was blue. My love of hands was solidified when I watched the movie Beaches. Hillary was sick and she forgot what her mother’s hands looked like as she herself was dying. She was frantically and furiously looking through pictures to find a glimpse of them. This moment sealed my love of hands.
When I found my mom dead she had a dark nail polish on her nails that needed to be removed. Her fingers were pointy, almost witch like and bony. The way I picture the hands from the witch from Snow White as she holds the poisonous apple in her hands. The thickness her fingers once had was completely gone. Her hands as I knew them were truly gone.
I remember my mom’s hands, practically perfect, always soft. Her nails were barely able to be seen from the tip of her fingers. I am sure she kept them short her entire life from the surgeries, long nails tend to break the gloves. She had pretty nails. Her hands were not wrinkled, just a few lines here and there and some visible veins across the top. Her hands are very similar to mine, yet mine are darker and have more wrinkles in my fingers than she ever did.
When her body was removed by the funeral home, three pieces of skin from her right arm remained. They had glued themselves perfectly on the edge of the tub. You could clearly see the lines or better yet the small wrinkles on them. I wanted no one to touch what remained of her. She left in a way she would have been horrified to see herself. I wasn’t going to let someone else clean up what was left of her. That was my job, my responsibility, my way of saying I’m here for you until the end, goodbye. Until we find our souls, our paths, our journeys in a different way once again.
Te amo mami.
February 28, 2021
