On Hands

I remember holding my father's hand and thinking it must be the heaviest part of him, heavier than the skull and the brain. I imagined it weighing more than those miles of coiled intestines lodged deep inside him like the chains of a cargo ship. They were certainly heavier than his heart; I thought of his heart as weighing the same as a beer can.

But here, in this print I found, his hand appeared small and delicate. I placed my hand over it, spreading my fingers exactly where his had been and found it was far small than mine. And there in the centre of the print where the middle of the palm hadn’t touched the paper was the unmistakeable shape of a heart. It looked just like the anatomy drawings of hearts we were given at school, I could clearly see the pulmonary artery leading off from the top right and on the left, if my memory has them the right way around, the pulmonary vein. Yet it also reminded me of the Scared Heart which blazes in the chest of Jesus in Roman Catholic depictions, an almost gaudy symbol of the power of love.