220204 Sentinel, Holding Hands

I don’t see young people holding hands these days.
Perhaps young and old are too busy using their hands to hold their cell phone and tap out messages.
I believe there is a strong energy exchanged when 2 people hold hands. When a mother holds a child’s hand, that child feels safe. When a person holds the hand of another in a hospital bed the patient feels a comfort that someone is there to help them recover or to comfort them as they are dying.

Young people who think they are in love used to hold hands to show their love for each other. During Joyce's and my courtship, she never held hands because there was such a powerful transfer of energy it scared her. If she felt as strongly as I felt when our hands touched, I understand why she avoided it. After we married it was still too much for her to handle. We could still feel the electrical energy surging between us in a powerful way.

That finally changed after her first aneurysm in 2017. She lost all vision in one eye and only had less than 20% vision in the other eye. When we were walking together after that I always held her hand so she wouldn’t fall. It was amusing to me when women, total strangers would come up to us and say, “It’s wonderful when people like you are still holding hands like when you were younger.” I would reply, “Thank you.” I never wanted to tell them why we were holding hands, why spoil the moment for them.

When Joyce was in ICU in Springfield after contracting meningitis (not from Springfield), also basal constrictions, and a host of other illnesses. I would hold her hand in her bed to try and alay the multiple hallucinations she was having. Those were some wild rides she was taking. She couldn’t even stand up and yet she thought she needed to get up and clean the dirty floors in her room. They were clean as a whistle. She wanted to have a cigarette and would tell her nurse that if her granddaughter was here she would give her grandmother a cigarette. She would ask me to give her a smoke that was in her purse beside the bed. There was no purse there. Joyce had many of those hallucinations while I was there at her bedside from dawn till dusk and sometimes well into the night. I was living the Charles Dickens novel “A tale of two Cities” with the quote, “It was the best of times and the worst of times.” There were many times when the worst days of my life were exhibited before me.
It is impossible to say which of the many individual days were the worst of my life. I can safely say the longest string of days in a row was when her doctor was in her room on a bad day. I asked him if Joyce was going to make it through? His reply was, “I’ll know after the next 4 days if she has a chance.” He didn’t sugar coat the answer at all. He just stated the fact in his mind. Those 4 days seemed to last an entire month.

I remember the best day during Joyce’s 2.5 months in the hospital came shortly after she had an encephalogram. The nurses had to shave 8 different patches down to her skull to attach leads to her so the test would work. The test came out well but her hair looked terrible. It was the eve of Christmas eve when she felt well enough to tell me to shave the rest of her head and bring her, her prettiest sweater to wear on Christmas day. I followed her instructions. And took the picture below.

It was and still is my favorite picture of her. She had a wonderful smile and there was an aura about her that thrills me today, 5.5 years later.