A burial of hands

I work at a children's hospital that specializes in extremely rare diseases and cancers.

On the floor where I work, the walls are decorated with hand prints. Every time a child is discharged after a transplant or major procedure-- bone marrow, stem cell, etc -- they get to play in the paint, basically, and stick up hand prints on the wall, along with their names, hometowns and whatever they want to write on the wall next to it. There are several prayers recorded there, and chronicles of victory through struggle.

I realize (and all the more since I've been there over a year now) that it can be sad to see the prints of children who left with such hope only to relapse, return and not make it this time. It can be, I know. But those kids had time, often years, that no one believed they'd have. So even if they didn't live forever (who does?) many of them lived longer and fuller lives than they would otherwise have been able to.

Why go into this? Because they've decided to remove the hand prints and to discontinue the practice. I'm sure it has as much to do with HIPAA as with anything else, but their removal depresses me in a way. They're replacing it with murals depicting various outdoor and athletic activities. I understand why they'd want to do murals -- nearly every other floor in the building has been painted with fun murals done by local artists. But still: we had the hand prints -- something not done for the kids, but rather something they did themselves.

And I like to think it helped the kids who are current patients. Looking at the names and hands of all the children who've gone through what they're going through and came through it -- kids who got to go home -- it just seems the sort of thing that builds hope. I know they helped me when after my diagnosis, I underwent chemo, radiation, bone marrow aspirates. Every hand is the hand of someone else -- all of them much younger than I am -- who'd endured similar (and worse) things.

They're photographing the hands and adding them to a scrapbook that they'll put on display, but it's not the same. I spent a lot of time studying the hands and names of the children and families represented. The families could write around the prints as well. Those that were there will, in a sense, be preserved. But there won't be anymore.

It's sad to look at the wall now. There are blank spots now where there used to be bright, child sized hands -- some sloppy, some neat, and all different. Empty places. It just feels like erasing hope. The mural proposals seem empty and meaningless by comparison.

And what's worse, I think, is that in a few years, many will have forgotten that the hands were even there.