She entered the elevator after my grandma and I. I was shy, and looked down as I said hello. If I saw her face again I would not recognize it. But her hands, her hands were where my eyes rested, and they still stand out to me.

The rest of her was all wrinkles. All sagging, all stooped. But that wasn’t what made her old. Anyone can hunch, and even I, at eighteen, have wrinkles. It was her hands that made her old. It wasn’t that they were wrinkled– the skin was stretched tight and smooth, a mottled and discolored skin on shriveled claws. I turned my eyes away. I was dehumanizing her. They weren’t claws, they were hands. I looked back. They were claws. I felt a guilt as I stood next to my grandmother as the elevator descended to the basement. Did I think of herthis way? I stared at her hands as she stood next to me, waiting for the doors of the car to open.

But her hands were still hands. Still the hands that had nurtured me, still the hands that had tucked me in, still the hands that I had held, crossing the street– they were still the hands that had loved me all my life.

But what of this other woman? What had her hands done to make them ugly, old, and unhuman?

I looked back one last time as we left the elevator, at the hands resting on the silver walker.

“So teach us to number our days…”

The words floated back to me from the Psalm in Sunday’s liturgy. I had sung them, cheerfully, lively.

I looked down at my own hands. My fingernails short and rounded off, the cuticles a little ragged, a callus on the finger where I rest my pen. My hands were immature, not a woman’s hands, but a girl’s. I have a scar at the base of the middle finger on my left hand, the reminder of a quick, careless, and angry grab for a music stand after a rough practice. The old lady’s hands were not scarred– or were they? They were so discolored and warped that I couldn’t tell.

I began to worry. Would my past, like this woman’s, disappear in the advent of years? What tasks would my hands fulfill before I reached her age?
I thought of what my future might bring, what my hands might do– promising, happy things: a diamond ring to wear, children to dandle, diapers to change, meals to cook– or would I, like a girl in a favorite film, possibly live a life unmarried, bookish, and unsettled?

Would time and old age disfigure my hands beyond recognition, or would they always seem young and capable like my grandmother’s, or– I thought, grimly, would they be crossed over my chest and laid in a coffin before they had time to become ugly?

I spent the next few days obsessing over hands: the tiny baby’s, that could do nothing but clutch and flail, the chubby toddler hands, sticky and dirty from eating and play. Youthful hands, full of potential– the young man whose sturdy hands tell more of his dreams than his words do, the new mother showing off her tiny baby for the first time. And the old farmer’s hands, thick and strong, worked day in and day out; and his wife’s, worked equally hard, but at different tasks; made rough by her toil, but still gentle for her simple and great work.

But of all the hands I saw and thought of– the short stubby fingers of a band director’s hands which I watched more than the baton, the perfect nuances of my ballet instructor’s hands, as she demonstrated the arabesque, the skillful movement of the organist’s at the Christmas concert– the hands I keep returning to are the hands of the old lady in the elevator. The hands that weren’t even human anymore, transformed by the sheer weight of living.

For all our days have passed away in Your wrath;
We finish our years like a sigh.
The days of our lives are seventy years;
And if by reason of strength they are eighty years,
Yet their boast is only labor and sorrow;
For it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
Who knows the power of Your anger?
For as the fear of You, so is Your wrath.
So teach us to number our days,
That we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Edit: For the curious, this is where the title comes from:

Never forget that you must die; that death will come sooner than you expect… God has written the letters of death upon your hands. In the inside of your hands you will see the letters M.M. It means “Memento Mori” – remember you must die. ~J. Furniss, Tracts for Spiritual Reading