First Contact
A nonfiction essay on death and touch
I didn’t expect to cry the first time I held a woman’s heart in my hands. The heart was a large cool weight, colored like pearlescent Georgia clay. It belonged to a woman who had died of a stroke at the age of 76, and who now lay before me in the basement cadaver lab of ——— University, faceless and open on the steel table. My classmates drew close around me, letting me cry, holding me with their presence, for the two minutes I took before I passed the heart to my left.
Massage therapy school is intense. For me, it was night classes fifteen hours a week, learning legal codes, debating ethical practices, categorizing the parts of the body from the mitochondria to the corpus callosum, and of course, learning touch. Always touch. For me, that was the most difficult part. Massage therapists learn a kind of touch that is just as psychological as it is physical, as we learn to think with our fingertips and emote with our palms. It is delicate and draining work, and at first I struggled to turn off my mind. I didn’t like to be touched so much by classmates that I barely knew. But I focused hard on learning our first skill: the “hello”. The “hello” is the first contact a massage therapist makes during a massage, and it is essential that it be full of calm and mindful intent. It lasts a breath before moving on, both a brief promise of trust and an expression of gratitude. It cannot be spoken, only felt.
