Squeezing hands and saying goodbye

Squeezing hands and saying goodbye

David Trinko dtrinko@limanews.com - 11.26.2007
It’s really nothing more than placing one piece of skin atop another and applying pressure.
But it’s difficult to think of another human interaction with the same power as squeezing a loved one’s hand.
It means you’re safe even if you’re uncomfortable when I squeeze my daughter’s hand as we walk into unfamiliar surroundings.
It means she appreciates the care I’m giving her when our newborn squeezes my hand during a feeding.
It means there’s something funny to see but I can’t say what right now when I squeeze my wife’s hand in a crowded room.
But sometimes it just means it’s OK to say goodbye.
My grandmother, Mary Jacobs, had a rough night at a hospital about a week ago. In a misinterpretation of hospital rules, the much-loved 93-year-old matriarch of my mother’s family went without any family support in her room for one night.
Her daughters and son promised my ailing grandmother she wouldn’t be left alone again as she progressed toward death. For the remainder of her time on this Earth, someone would hold her hand.
They lived up to that promise. Each day, 24 hours a day, for nearly a week, someone held at least one of her hands. Perhaps it was one of her children or grandchildren. Perhaps it was a longtime friend. Sometimes it was someone my relatives didn’t seem to know that well, but that person felt touched enough by my grandma to visit her in her final days.
By the time I arrived at her hospital in suburban Chicago quite late Friday night, she’d been through dozens upon dozens of hands. Now unable to speak and sleeping constantly, people kept saying how unfortunate it was she couldn’t communicate anymore. But she did communicate, just as I would with my daughter or my wife in their circumstances.
When I made an uneasy joke to lighten the tension, she squeezed my hand to show her appreciation.
When I prayed with her, she squeezed my hand to show her faith.
When I talked about how hard it was to say goodbye, she squeezed my hand particularly hard. It was OK to say goodbye.
Late Saturday night, I heard the news that Mary Jacobs, better known as Grandma to dozens of lucky children including me, died. I think the woman behind the kind eyes left earlier in the day, as her hands didn’t include those communicative squeezes anymore.
Her funeral will be today, and we’ll all be there to do what grieving children and grandchildren do. Whenever I’m overcome with the grief, I’m reminded of that final squeeze of the hand. It’s the one that said it’s OK to be sad. It’s OK to miss her. But most importantly, it’s OK to say goodbye.
And it’s OK to give my own wife and children an extra squeeze or two of the hand, just to show them I care.

Hometowns change more than we care to admit

Hometowns change more than we care to admit

David Trinko dtrinko@limanews.com - 11.12.2007
For most of my life, I was convinced nothing ever changed in Arlington. Something tells me other folks think the same of their hometowns.
Arlington is a small village like so many others in the region — close-knit, focused on its school and boasting a handful of home-grown businesses.
For the first 21 years of my life, that two-stoplight town in Hancock County was home. To some degree, that friendly town with 1,351 people remains home. My parents still live in that two-story house across from the fire station. People driving by still wave when I cross the street there.
The football team’s always good. The garbage bags sit outside every Friday morning. And warm summer nights are always interrupted by children screaming as they dive into the village-run swimming pool.
There are 43 boys, freshmen through seniors, on the Red Devils’ football team this year, which is pretty impressive since there are only 87 boys in the 10th, 11th and 12th grades in the high school.
I’m beginning to wonder if nostalgia might be holding Arlington and places like it back, though.
The world does change, even if we won’t allow it in our minds.
The Ford dealership closed years ago. There’s no proof left of the old Allis-Chalmers dealer, as grass covers where those tractors once sat. The pharmacy and hardware store each moved to smaller locations.
There is progress, even in a small town.
The football team made the playoffs for the first time this year. The Red Devils are playing Ada at Lima Stadium on Saturday for the regional championship. It’s a new honor for the smallest school in Ohio to win 500 games, a new plateau for a school that ranks 31st in the state in all-time victories.
There’s finally a steady pizza place in town, as Jack-n-Do’s Pizza from Findlay settled into the north side of town.
And there’s plenty of new housing popping up all over town. Fields that once raised wheat, soybeans and corn are home to a crop of young families now.
That swimming pool with the screaming kids is different from the one I used as a youth. They completely tore it up and rebuilt it while I was at college.
Even the people running the schools change. I see from the school’s Web site that only 10 of my teachers are still out there, and I don’t recognize any of the administrators’ names. I do recognize some school board and village council members’ names, but that’s because I went to school with some of them.
I’ve been out of that “red brick prison,” as we called it, longer than I was ever in it.
There has to come a time when you realize your nostalgic view of a place isn’t necessarily reality.
I worry that a proposed new school there failed last week for this very reason.
When I heard they wanted a half-percent income tax 7.9 mill bond issue to build a new school, I’d bet I reacted the same way everyone else did. I thought, “The school’s not in that bad of shape.”
That’s how nostalgia hits you. I didn’t think about the classes in the old locker room beneath the old gym. I didn’t consider how poorly heated or cooled some of those classrooms were back in the day. Instead, I reacted with, “If it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for them.”
I didn’t react with the reality I haven’t wandered those halls in more than a dozen years.
The reality is those kids don’t attend the same school I did. They don’t live in the same town where I grew up.
In that way, Arlington is a small village like so many others in the region — full of people who won’t accept that time changes everything.