Why We Hold Hands

Why We Hold Hands

There was once a time when we were not yet people. We were aquatic apes. We had lost most of our body hair. We gained subcutaneous fat more commonly seen in other aquatic mammals like cetaceans and seals than in any other great ape. Our posture straightened along the vertical, more appropriate to bobbing head and shoulders at the water surface, floating on our backs, or swimming at speed. Our females' breasts grew buoyant, women's hair grew long and strong on their heads and our newborns - plump at birth, unique among apes - had gripping strength in their tiny hands strong enough to carry their own weight. Strong enough to hold on to their mother's hair in the water. Even now when some children are submerged in deep cold water, they do not drown. They enter a state of suspended animation which allows them to recover unharmed when they should have succumbed to hypoxic brain injury. Diving Reflex it is called.

There was a time when we were not yet human, but strange aquatic apes. But we held hands. We held hands for the same reason sea otters hold hands. So we will not be carried by the tide or drift apart. So that what life and fortune has brought together may no circumstance tear asunder. For together you are me and I am you and as God Is then We Are together. You and me and that small life and sanity saving miracle of a lap dog. And we sit and hold hands together. Like we did long before we were Man.
I've just turned 41 and have outlived my father by nearly a decade, who died when I was six. My mother has just had a pro-active mastectomy for stage one breast cancer. Mortality is on my mind. Could I ever have understood what I do now? It's unanswerable, but not for lack of trying. I have spent the past decade trying to feel out the path that father took on his way off this island of relativity of space time and matter adrift in the ocean of the eternal and absolute that is the Mind of God. (Hold hands children, it really is just such a brief span of time.) I feel, maybe, that I can see just outside the envelope, just barely around the corner. But human perceptions are so weak, and the most huge and inescapable of mysteries are never to be grasped until they are so close. Like swimming up to a cliff face or approaching some vast creature in dim murky water. (Hold tightly children.) Why could I not see then what I do now? It was because there were doubts. Mistakes that just had to be made. Losses to be endured. Lessons learned.

You count your blessings and pick your evils.
I love my little dog. She is smart, stubborn, manipulative and altogether adorable. And one day, she will die. When where how? Hopefully not for over another decade. Who knows where we will be. Hopefully it will be the result of the end of a really good run of living. Why must she die? Because she was born. Because of her, one day there will be a hole in my heart in the size and shape of a 10 lb lap dog big enough to hold suns.
I love my wife and hold her in no less regard. Brilliant, beautiful, talented, imperious, wounded, vulnerable, stubborn, and so very often right. After all these years she still moves me.
We sit watch TV, hold hands. The dog lays between us. Her front end on Mama, her butt rests on me; completing the circuit. We are a family. A living social unit. A composite spiritual organism. In a family unit, whatever its composition, there is a recreation of the illusion every infant is born into. That the baby is not separate from its mother. At the very dawn of cognition it knows the horror of separation akin only to being dismembered. We revisit this dread again, attachment to a gangrenous member when love dies or becomes unrequited and the composite entity takes on the shag of a dying beast, the stench of a rotten love affair. The agony of psychic dismemberment not only returns, but may perforce be necessary and must be self-inflicted. When it happens to a family with children involved, the amputations are so much more than psychic and often much worse still for the children.
So we hold hands. For all that we have put together, let us not allow ourselves to pull asunder. Hold hands.
For Heaven and Earth are never united save in the heart of our beings alone, thus all Mankind is the product of a broken home. We hold hands.

The loss that awaits is inevitable. It is a consequence of being carried along by the river of Time that stops for no man woman or dog. However tightly we hold hands we are sundered at last and the loss is for everyone who is left to share, though some more than others. And why is that?
It is because we count our blessings and pick our evils.
We sign up for these losses and heartbreaks because we are fortunate, because we are blessed, because we are lucky. Lucky to have such fine company, even if only for a while. Blessed to be married to such a good woman and to have such a good dog. Fortunate to know that they will miss me when I'm gone, as I will miss them if I am left here first. It is so much better than the alternative which is to be the tree that falls in the forest with no one to hear. To die unknown, unloved, unmourned.

But it could have been better. I have no children. No grandchildren. Only a dog, who is an excellent surrogate I suppose - no one could ask for a better fur-baby. But I cannot share with her the life lessons I've learned. The pearls of wisdom I've polished studiously and bought with so much pain I would love to leave to my progeny as a legacy. It hurts to think that everything I have learned will just disappear and serve no one once I have gone. But I have no sons or daughters to pass on what I have learned to. Save for you, my gentle readers.
You don't know me, I don't know you. But do me a favor. Think about the lessons your life have held for you, and if you have a son or daughter, or grandchildren...and tell them the lessons of your life. This is how the world is supposed to improve in every generation. The generational disconnect forces every new generation to recreate the wheel. We could be on Mars by now! Think about the lessons your parents and grand parents shared with you. All I really learned from my own father is what happens when we die. I'm proud of what I have sussed out for myself, but I would have liked to have learned more.

And most importantly, forget the battle of wills, preconceived notions of family honor and decorum. The world is a better place when families are strong and support one another. Hold each other without reservation. Take each others hands.

Post Script: 9-23-22

Earlier this year our dog died. My friends on Twitter helps me adjust. It was one of the most wrenching things I ever experienced. She was a damn good person.