When we offer a helping hand
“Here. Hold my hand.”
We stand at the curb. My granddaughter looks both ways. “No cars!” she pronounces. She’s right, but I’m taller. I can see a pickup turning our way from a block down. We’ll have just enough time to cross before it reaches us.
“Let’s go,” I say, cutting short her inspection of some beetles burrowing into a crack at the edge of the sidewalk. We step into the street and stride across.
Safe. Thanks to the three most potent words in the English language: Hold My Hand. I suppose “I love you” ranks highly as well. But it’s abstract and requires a baseline of past action to be genuine. Hold My Hand is corporeal. It’s active. It’s right now.
Children know this. When our granddaughters were tiny and riding in carseats behind us on nighttime drives, we risked dislocating a shoulder to reach back and hold their hands when they got scared. Through the darkness of a long highway, or the off-and-on bursts of illumination from passing street lights, a hand to hold reassured them we were still there, even though they couldn’t see our faces.
When I was in labor, the nurse held my hand during contractions until my husband could get to the hospital. I didn’t have to ask her. She knew. She laced her fingers with mine, held on tight, and talked me through. It helped. I would thank her again, if I bumped into her today.
When our daughter fractured a toe, she nearly crushed a few fingers of her dad’s hand by clinging to it while the doctors moved the bone back in place. I don’t think he could have broken her grip, even if he’d tried. He almost became their next patient that day.
Holding hands used to be a rung on the ladder of dating. (The Beatles confirmed that.) I don’t know if there’s a ladder anymore. I don’t know if there’s dating anymore. But I do know that holding hands remained important for my parents, 50 or more decades into their marriage.
As they got older, they situated their recliners close enough to reach out and hold hands across the gap while they watched television at night. I noticed them doing it every now and then, if I walked in from the kitchen without announcing myself. It told me more about their relationship than a Netflix documentary. They remained forever sweethearts.
How often, when an unexpected hello with a friend downtown turns into a deeper conversation about heartfelt matters, do we close the exchange with a quick clasp of hands. That small action marks the end of shared words, but the beginning of pledged support. “I’ll remember,” it says, “and I’ll petition for you and check in with you.”
Please understand, this genuine clasp of hands is not to be confused with the infamous Pastor Handshake, in which a “Fine sermon today” acknowledgement at the church door turns into a two-handed fist pump that lasts four seconds too long. The authentic hand-clasp is a shared moment of connection, the physical expression of understanding and shoulder-to-shoulder camaraderie.
It happens beside hospital beds, while saying grace around the table, when gathered at a headstone. It happens walking down the aisle, navigating a tricky spot on the way up a 14er, crossing a finish line together.
If “Watch for deer” is Midwest-speak for “I love you,” then “Hold my hand” is the universal expression for “I’m here.” It contains “I love you” and adds, “I will speak with you, steady you, pilot you, look a block up the road for you (both ways), sit in the dark with you, shoulder fear with you, turn down the volume on unfamiliar situations with you,” and a host of other “I wills.”
The next time you take someone’s hand, or ask someone to take yours, remember that you’re acting as part of a tradition that’s older than time. And in that moment, just as dear.