The Things My Hands Remember

It is Saturday morning.

I am sitting here with my first coffee of the day, trying to wake up properly, while Ember is causing complete chaos in the living room.

There is something about cats that fascinates me.

They can be completely relaxed one minute and then, without warning, decide that the entire house has become an obstacle course.

A noise.

A movement.

Something that apparently only they can see.

And suddenly there is chaos.

Ember is doing exactly that this morning.

Running.

Jumping.

Investigating things that have apparently been sitting in the same place for months but have suddenly become suspicious.

And as I sit here watching it all unfold, coffee in hand, I find myself reflecting on the week that has just passed.

It has been a huge week at work.

One of those weeks where you get to Saturday morning and realise just how much you have been carrying without really stopping to think about it.

Then, somewhere in the middle of everything, there was my orthopaedic appointment with Professor Randy Bindra.

The appointment I had been waiting for.

The appointment that would finally give me some clarity about what was happening with my left pinky finger.

I had known surgery was likely.

At least, I thought I had.

But there is a strange difference between knowing something might happen and sitting in a room while somebody explains exactly what is going to happen to your body.

That is when it becomes real.

And as I write this, I think I am still trying to process it.

My left pinky finger is going to be shortened.

A chunk of bone will be removed.

Then a stainless-steel screw will be inserted to fuse the bone together.

I don't think I was expecting that.

That is the strange part.

I genuinely didn't know what I was expecting.

I knew there was a problem.

I knew something needed to be done.

I knew I was seeing one of the leading specialists in this area for a reason.

But for some reason, I didn't expect to hear that part of my finger would be removed.

I didn't expect the word shortened to land the way it did.

And perhaps that is because when something belongs to your body, you don't spend much time thinking about its individual parts until one of them is threatened.

You just use them.

Every day.

Without ceremony.

Without appreciation.

Without even noticing.

Until suddenly you do.

And now, for some reason, I have been thinking about my hands.

A lot.

I was talking to Bianca last night, and I found myself trying to explain something that I hadn't fully understood until this week.

I think I am grieving.

Not in some catastrophic sense.

I know that.

I know there are people facing diagnoses and surgeries far more serious than mine.

I know I am fortunate that there is a plan.

I know I am fortunate that the problem can be treated.

I know this is not the end of my hand.

I know I will still have my finger.

I know life will continue.

And yet.

I am angry.

And underneath that anger, there is something else.

Something that feels a little like grief.

Because I never realised how much I appreciated my hands until I was told that one of them was going to change.

There is something deeply personal about your hands.

Your face is how much of the world recognises you.

Your voice carries your thoughts.

But your hands?

Your hands have been there for almost everything.

They have touched your life.

Literally.

They have carried things.

Built things.

Broken things.

Created things.

Destroyed things.

Held on.

Let go.

Your hands remember things that your mind has forgotten.

There are memories wired into them.

Muscle memory.

Instinct.

Movement that no longer requires thought.

And as I sat there talking to Bianca last night, I started thinking about everything these hands have done.

The people I have hugged.

The hands I have shaken.

The people I have touched on the shoulder when words didn't seem necessary.

The times I have held somebody close.

The moments where affection didn't need a sentence.

There is something profoundly human about hands.

We reach for one another with them.

We comfort with them.

We greet with them.

We say goodbye with them.

We hold babies with them.

We wipe away tears with them.

We place them on the shoulders of people we pray for.

We extend them when somebody needs help getting back up.

We don't think about any of that when our hands are working.

We just live.

And perhaps that is why this week has affected me more deeply than I expected.

Because suddenly, for the first time in a long time, I have been forced to notice something I have taken for granted.

My hands.

I have been thinking about writing.

That one probably hit me harder than anything.

Because writing has become such a significant part of my life.

Not just because I am an author.

Not simply because I have published books.

But because writing became one of the ways I learned how to make sense of my own life.

There are things I have written that I could never have said out loud.

There are memories that only came into focus once I started putting words around them.

There are wounds I didn't understand until I tried to explain them.

There are parts of my life that exist in books now because my hands sat down at a keyboard and refused to let the story remain buried.

These hands have written about hospital rooms.

About surviving.

About God.

About death.

About addiction.

About grace.

About trauma.

About things I once thought I would take to my grave.

They helped turn memories into sentences.

Sentences into chapters.

Chapters into books.

And somehow those books became part of the world outside my own head.

That is still something I struggle to comprehend.

A thought can begin inside you.

Something completely invisible.

A memory.

An idea.

A sentence.

Then your fingers begin moving.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

And eventually somebody else, somewhere else, can hold that thought in their own hands.

There is something almost sacred about that.

And perhaps that is why I keep looking at my left hand differently now.

Not because I believe the surgery will stop me from writing.

It won't.

But because I have suddenly realised just how much of my life has passed through my hands.

Even something as simple as making this coffee.

I didn't think about it this morning.

I just did it.

Reached.

Lifted.

Poured.

Held the mug.

The warmth of it sitting in my hand.

Completely ordinary.

And yet this morning it doesn't feel quite as ordinary.

I thought about how many cups of coffee I have made in my life.

At home.

At work.

For other people.

During conversations.

During quiet mornings.

During late nights when sleep was nowhere to be found.

Coffee has become part of the rhythm of my life.

And my hands have been there for every single one.

Then there are the cats.

I have thought about that too.

The simple act of patting them.

Running your hand across their fur.

Feeling them lean into you.

There is no great theology in that.

No profound revelation.

It is just one living thing touching another.

But perhaps that is enough.

Perhaps some of the things we take most for granted are the things that become most precious when we stop long enough to notice them.

A hand resting on the back of a cat.

A warm mug.

A handshake.

A hug.

A keyboard.

And then my mind went somewhere else.

Karate.

That chapter of my life feels like another lifetime in some ways.

But my hands remember it.

The breaking of roof tiles.

The training.

The impact.

The discipline.

The repetition.

The strange confidence that comes from learning what your body can do when your mind wants to give up.

There is something almost funny about it now.

Years ago, I was deliberately training my hands to break things.

Now I am sitting here thinking deeply about how fragile they actually are.

Life has a way of humbling us.

I remember the feeling of breaking roof tiles.

The focus before impact.

The positioning.

The commitment.

Because hesitation was often worse than the strike itself.

You had to go through it.

Not at it.

Through it.

And perhaps there is something strangely familiar about that lesson now.

Sometimes life puts something in front of you that you cannot gently negotiate your way around.

Sometimes you have to go through it.

Not because you wanted to.

Not because you chose it.

But because there is no other way forward.

And that is where I find myself with this surgery.

I didn't choose the injury.

I didn't choose the diagnosis.

I didn't choose the procedure.

But now that the path is clear, I have to walk it.

There is a strange finality to a surgical explanation.

Especially when you have spent enough time around hospitals.

And I have.

More than I ever expected to.

Hospitals have been part of my story for most of my life.

There have been surgeries.

Recovery rooms.

Appointments.

Waiting rooms.

Conversations with specialists.

Moments where you wait for somebody to tell you what happens next.

And perhaps because of that history, I thought I would be better prepared for this.

I thought I would hear the information, process it logically and move on.

I know how hospitals work.

I understand procedures.

I work within Queensland Health.

I have spent enough time around the medical system to understand the difference between a problem and a catastrophe.

And this is not a catastrophe.

I keep reminding myself of that.

But I am learning that understanding something intellectually doesn't mean you don't get to feel it emotionally.

That has been an important distinction for me this week.

I don't need to convince myself that this is the worst thing that has ever happened to me in order to admit that I don't like it.

I don't need to compare my situation to somebody else's in order to justify feeling disappointed.

I can be grateful that the problem has a solution and still be angry that the solution involves changing part of my body.

Both things can be true.

I think I am getting better at allowing two things to exist at the same time.

I can trust God and still feel afraid.

I can be grateful and still be angry.

I can know that I will be okay and still feel grief about what is changing.

Perhaps maturity is not pretending that one emotion cancels another.

Perhaps it is learning how to hold them without letting one destroy the other.

So yes.

I am angry.

I didn't expect to feel that.

But I do.

There is something about being told that part of your finger is going to be removed that makes you confront a strange kind of loss.

Even a small loss is still a loss.

And maybe that is what I have been struggling to articulate.

I am not grieving my entire hand.

I am not facing some life-ending diagnosis.

But something that has been part of me for forty-three years is going to be physically different.

That is strange.

And I think I am allowed to acknowledge that.

I think sometimes we are too quick to talk ourselves out of our own feelings.

We say things like:

Other people have it worse.

At least it isn't this.

At least it isn't that.

I should just be grateful.

And gratitude is important.

I believe that.

But gratitude should not require dishonesty.

Sometimes you can say thank you and still say this hurts.

Sometimes you can recognise that things could have been worse without pretending that what happened doesn't matter.

This week has reminded me that I don't always have to be the strong version of myself.

I have spent much of my life being strong because I had to be.

Survival teaches you that.

You learn how to push through.

You learn how to get up.

You learn how to keep moving even when you don't particularly want to.

And there is value in that.

I wouldn't have survived certain seasons without it.

But there is also a danger.

If you spend enough of your life surviving, you can begin believing that strength means never allowing yourself to feel the weight of anything.

You can become so accustomed to saying, I'll be fine, that you forget to ask yourself whether you are actually okay.

I will be fine.

I believe that.

The surgery will happen.

There will be recovery.

There will probably be frustration.

There will be adjustments.

Then life will continue.

I will go back to work.

I will keep writing.

I will keep drinking coffee.

I will keep patting Ember while he creates unnecessary destruction around the house.

I will keep hugging Bianca.

I will keep shaking hands.

I will keep living.

But that doesn't mean I have to rush past this moment.

Maybe this moment deserves to be felt.

Maybe grief isn't always standing at a funeral.

Maybe sometimes grief is sitting at your kitchen table with a coffee, staring at your own hand and suddenly understanding that you never appreciated something because you never imagined having to lose part of it.

That thought has stayed with me.

How many things do we only notice when they are threatened?

How many ordinary parts of our lives are quietly holding everything together while we are busy worrying about things we don't even have?

Our hands.

Our health.

Our homes.

Our relationships.

A morning without pain.

The ability to walk into a room without thinking about whether you can get there.

The ability to pick something up.

To type.

To hug somebody.

To make coffee.

To open a door.

To scratch the head of a cat who is currently destroying your living room.

Life is filled with these small miracles that become almost invisible because they happen every day.

Until one day, something changes.

And suddenly you see them.

I think that is what this diagnosis has done to me.

It has made my hands visible.

Not just physically.

Emotionally.

Spiritually, perhaps.

I have started thinking about what they represent.

These hands have carried my past.

They have also helped build my future.

They have worked.

They have cleaned.

They have cooked.

They have trained.

They have written.

They have held books with my own name on the cover.

That still sounds strange to say.

There was a time in my life when I didn't know if I would ever build anything meaningful.

There were times when I was just trying to survive the next day.

And now I sit here with books published.

Stories written.

Projects waiting.

Ideas constantly moving through my head.

And all of it, in some strange way, has passed through these hands.

I thought about that when I was talking to Bianca.

I thought about the life I have built with them.

Not perfectly.

God knows it hasn't been perfect.

These hands have made mistakes too.

They have held things they should have let go of.

They have reached for things that weren't good for me.

They have been part of decisions I regret.

But they were there through all of it.

And perhaps that is another reason this feels emotional.

My hands are witnesses.

They have been with me through every version of myself.

The young man I used to be.

The sick eighteen-year-old.

The man in hospital.

The addict.

The man trying to find his way back.

The Christian learning what grace actually means.

The writer.

The worker.

The man standing where I am now.

They have been there.

Quietly.

Faithfully.

Doing what hands do.

And now one of them is going to change.

Maybe that is why it feels like grief.

Because grief isn't always about losing something completely.

Sometimes it is about saying goodbye to the way something was.

I don't know exactly what my hand will feel like after surgery.

I don't know how quickly I will adjust.

I don't know what it will feel like when I first look at it afterwards.

I don't know whether my mind will immediately accept the change or whether I will need time.

But I do know this.

My life is not contained in the length of my little finger.

My ability to write is not contained in one bone.

My future is not determined by a screw.

And yet knowing those things does not make the emotions disappear.

It simply gives them somewhere to stand.

And perhaps that is faith for me right now.

Not pretending I am unaffected.

Not declaring that everything is wonderful.

Not trying to turn surgery into some dramatic spiritual lesson before I have even gone through it.

Just saying:

God, I don't particularly like this.

I didn't expect this.

I am angry about parts of it.

I am grateful for the medical care.

I am grateful there is a plan.

But I am still trying to process what it means.

Here it is.

That feels more honest.

And perhaps God has always preferred honesty over performance anyway.

I have spent enough years around Christianity to know how easy it can be to produce the correct answer.

Someone asks how you are.

Blessed.

Someone asks whether you are worried.

No, I am trusting God.

Someone asks whether you are struggling.

No, God is good.

And God is good.

But sometimes we use true statements to avoid telling the truth about ourselves.

I can say God is good and still admit that I am struggling to process something.

Those things do not contradict each other.

Jesus Himself wept.

The Psalms are filled with people telling God exactly how they felt.

Fear.

Anger.

Confusion.

Grief.

Questions.

Faith has never required emotional dishonesty.

If anything, perhaps real faith requires enough trust to stop pretending.

So this Saturday morning, that is where I am.

Coffee.

Chaos in the living room.

Ember apparently convinced that something terrible will happen if he does not investigate every corner of the house.

And me sitting here thinking about my hands.

Thinking about surgery.

Thinking about how strange it is that a single conversation with a specialist can make you look differently at something you have lived with every day of your life.

I keep looking at my pinky.

It looks normal.

That is another strange thing.

There is no obvious warning label.

No visible announcement that soon there will be surgery.

It is just there.

Part of my hand.

Part of me.

And yet I now know something about its future that I didn't know a week ago.

Perhaps that is what life is like.

We walk around carrying futures inside ordinary days without knowing what is coming.

Then sometimes the future arrives early in the form of a conversation.

A diagnosis.

A phone call.

A letter.

A date on a calendar.

And suddenly you find yourself standing at the edge of something you weren't expecting.

I suppose the question is what you do then.

Years ago, I probably would have wanted to fight the entire experience.

To demand an explanation.

To become consumed by the injustice of it.

Maybe part of me still wants to.

There is still a voice inside me that says:

Why again?

How many times does a body have to be repaired?

How many operations can one person go through before he gets tired of hearing the word surgery?

Those are honest questions.

I don't have neat answers for them.

And perhaps I don't need to.

One of the things I am slowly learning is that not every question has to be resolved before you can continue living.

Sometimes you carry the question with you.

Sometimes the answer comes later.

Sometimes it doesn't.

But life continues.

The coffee still gets cold.

The cat still creates chaos.

The sun still comes up.

People still need to be hugged.

Books still need to be written.

And perhaps that is the strange beauty of ordinary life.

It keeps calling you back.

Back into the present.

Back into what is actually here.

Not the surgery yet.

Not the recovery yet.

Not every possible complication my mind could invent.

Today.

This Saturday.

This coffee.

This living room.

This cat.

These hands.

Still here.

Still capable.

Still carrying my life.

And perhaps that is enough for today.

I don't need to pretend I am excited about surgery.

I am not.

I don't need to pretend I don't care that my finger will be shortened.

I do care.

I don't need to transform this into a motivational speech about overcoming adversity.

Not everything needs to become content.

Some things simply need to be felt.

And perhaps this is one of those things.

Perhaps writing about it is simply my way of sitting with it.

Of giving shape to something I am still trying to understand.

That is what writing has always done for me.

I write toward clarity.

I don't always start with the answer.

Sometimes I start with the question.

Then I follow it.

Sentence by sentence.

Thought by thought.

Until eventually something inside me becomes visible.

And I think what has become visible this morning is gratitude.

Real gratitude.

Not the shallow kind that denies disappointment.

The deeper kind.

The kind that exists beside grief.

I am grateful for my hands.

I am grateful for everything they have allowed me to do.

I am grateful for the people they have touched.

The work they have performed.

The stories they have written.

The things they have built.

The things they have broken.

The coffee they have held.

The cats they have patted.

The people they have hugged.

The prayers they have accompanied.

I am even grateful for the memories stored somewhere inside them.

The karate.

The writing.

The work.

The life.

Maybe I didn't realise how grateful I was until I was told something was going to change.

That is unfortunate.

But perhaps it is also an invitation.

To notice.

To appreciate.

To stop assuming that ordinary things will always remain ordinary.

There is something sacred about noticing your life while you are still living it.

Not after.

Not when something is gone.

Now.

Today.

I don't know exactly what my hand will look like after surgery.

I don't know exactly how I will feel when I wake up afterwards.

I don't know what the recovery will teach me.

But I know this much.

This finger may change.

My hands will eventually bear another scar.

But I have lived with scars long enough to know that they don't always represent what was taken.

Sometimes they represent what remained.

A scar says something happened here.

But it also says healing happened here.

Perhaps that is what I need to remember as I walk toward this next surgery.

Something is changing.

Yes.

But something is also being repaired.

And perhaps I can hold both of those truths at the same time.

I can grieve what is being lost.

And still be grateful for what is being preserved.

I can be angry.

And still trust.

I can be disappointed.

And still have hope.

I can look at my hand and feel sadness.

And still thank God that I have used these hands to live the life I have lived.

Maybe that is where I am this Saturday morning.

Somewhere between anger and gratitude.

Somewhere between grief and acceptance.

Somewhere between the hand I have known for forty-three years and the hand I will have after surgery.

And perhaps I don't need to rush through that space.

Perhaps I can just sit here for a while.

Drink my coffee.

Watch Ember continue his campaign of destruction across the living room.

Look at my hands.

And remember.

Remember the life they have carried.

The people they have touched.

The things they have created.

The battles they have fought.

The stories they have written.

The roof tiles they have broken.

The coffee they have made.

The cats they have patted.

The hands they have shaken.

The people they have held.

The prayers they have offered.

The life they have helped me build.

And perhaps that is why this feels like grief.

Because sometimes you don't realise how much something means to you until you are told it will never quite be the same again.

But perhaps grief is not the end of the story.

Perhaps sometimes grief simply teaches us to pay attention.

To what we still have.

To what remains.

To what is still possible.

So today, I am trying to do exactly that.

My left pinky finger is going to change.

That is real.

The surgery is real.

The anger is real.

The grief is real.

But so is everything else.

The coffee is real.

Ember is definitely real and currently making sure I don't forget it.

Bianca is real.

My work is real.

My books are real.

The life I have built is real.

The people I love are real.

My faith is real.

And my hands, for now, are still here.

So maybe this morning I will simply let them be what they have always been.

Not something I need to analyse.

Not something I need to mourn before the time comes.

Just hands.

My hands.

Marked by life.

Full of memories.

Still capable of holding a coffee.

Still capable of reaching for the people I love.

Still capable of touching the keyboard and turning whatever is happening inside me into words.

And perhaps that is enough for today.

Just to notice.

Just to be grateful.

Just to admit that sometimes even a non-catastrophic diagnosis can still leave you feeling angry.

Just to allow grief to exist without apologising for it.

Just to trust that healing can sometimes involve change.

And just to keep living.

One ordinary Saturday morning at a time. 

---

About the Author

Dylan Verdun Sullivan is the founder of Refined by Fire Press and an Australian author indexed in the National Library of Australia. As a Level 7 Local Guide with over 6.1 million views on Google Maps, he documents the intersection of faith, recovery, and the light found in ordinary places.

• Read the Memoir: Kissed by Death on Amazon
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