When she could still walk and stand, I held my cousin Leslie’s hand to steady and support her. It was also comforting and pleasurable for me, and I think for her, but I never thought about it as more than that.
When Alzheimer’s took away her ability to walk and stand her daughter Lisa and I sometimes held her hand to offer assurance when she seemed anxious or stressed—from being questioned, transferred to or from her wheel chair, or moved into an unfamiliar setting. Holding hands for that also seemed pretty straight forward.
But two years after she’d lost her capacity for speech, standing and walking, Lisa and I realized Leslie wasn’t just holding hands. She was playing, teasing us or showing affec- tion, sympathy and appreciation. Or she was wrestling with something we’d said, trying to remember or explore something, or letting us know she was present and asking us to be too. Our hand-to hand interactions went so far beyond “holding” that we needed a new term. “Hand chatting” seemed about right, so we started calling it that and never looked back.