My Hands Started Failing Before The Rest Of Me Did

The knob on the bathroom door

I was fifty four when I noticed I could not open my own bathroom door without thinking about it first.

Not that I could not open it. I could. But there was a small negotiation happening, a half second where my right hand arrived at the knob and my brain said, wait, and I adjusted my grip, and I turned it with the heel of my palm instead of my fingers. I had been doing this for months. You do not notice a thing like that until one morning you are running late and you are standing in a passage in Kloof with your hand on a round brass knob, and you realise you have been quietly rearranging your life around a doorknob.

That was the beginning of a bad year and then a better one.

The diagnosis, when it came, had a name I will not put in here, because this is not a story about a disease and I am tired of being a person with a disease. It is enough to say that my hands are not what they were, that mornings are worse than evenings, that cold is my enemy, and that I have made peace with about seventy percent of it.

Things a house does to you

I had lived in that house for nineteen years. My late husband and I bought it when our daughter was small, and we did nothing to it, in the way that people who intend to do everything to a house end up doing nothing to it. There was always something else. School fees. A car. A geyser that burst in the middle of a Sunday lunch and took the ceiling with it.

So the house stayed as it was, which is to say it stayed as a house built in 1978 for people with young hands.

Round knobs on every internal door. A kitchen with cupboard fittings that were little brass mushrooms you had to pinch. A bathroom cabinet with a catch you had to press and pull at the same time, and which my daughter could never work either, and which we all just accepted, the way you accept a bad step on a staircase.

What I want to say about this, and I am going to say it badly, is that a house you cannot open is a house that is slowly telling you that you are less of a person than you were.

Nobody says that to your face. Nobody has to. The door says it.

The Wednesday of the pickles

The moment I actually broke was not a door at all. It was a jar of pickles.

My daughter had come for supper with the man she was seeing, who was very polite and very tall and clearly wanted his one job that evening to be a success, and his one job was to bring pickles. I said I would open them. I do not know why I said that. Pride is a thing that lives in the hands.

I stood at the counter with my back to the table and I could not open the jar, and I stood there for what felt like a full minute, and I could hear the conversation behind me getting careful, and then my daughter said, in a voice I have never forgiven and have completely forgiven, "Ma, give it here."

I gave it here. She opened it. We ate the pickles.

Afterwards I sat on the edge of my bed and did the thing where you are not crying, you are just sitting with your hands in your lap looking at them like they belong to someone else.

The list

The next morning I did the only thing I know how to do when I am frightened, which is to make a list.

I walked through the house with a notebook, and at every place where I had been doing a little negotiation, I wrote it down. It took me an hour and it was the most useful hour of my year.

The list was long. The front door. The bathroom. Both bedrooms. The kitchen cupboards. The bathroom cabinet with the terrible catch. The taps, which were the cross type that you have to grip and twist, and which I had started opening with a dishcloth for extra purchase without ever consciously deciding to.

And then, at the bottom, the thing I had not admitted was on the list: the basin.

The basin in the main bathroom was a pedestal, and the vanity next to it was a cupboard with a door that swung out and a shelf you had to kneel to reach, and I had stopped keeping anything in it, and I had started keeping my things in a plastic packet on the windowsill like a person camping in her own bathroom.

What I learned, mostly by getting it wrong

My first move was to buy the wrong things.

I went to a big place on a Saturday, feeling brave, and I bought a bag of lever handles because a woman on the internet said levers were the answer. Levers are the answer. But I bought them by looking at pictures, and when I got home I discovered that the ones I had chosen had a very stiff spring, and that a stiff spring is exactly as much of an enemy as a round knob when your fingers are having a bad morning.

I also discovered, standing in my passage with a screwdriver I could barely hold, that I did not know the difference between a handle on a rose and a handle on a backplate, that my doors had holes drilled in a way that not every set will cover, and that "60mm backset" is a phrase I would come to say out loud in shops with a confidence I had not earned.

It was my neighbour's son, who does bathrooms for a living and who is one of those young men who explains things without making you feel stupid, who slowed me down. He stood in my passage on a Sunday with a cup of tea and he said, "Auntie, you must feel them first. Don't buy from a picture."

So I did that. I went and I put my hands on things. I spent a whole morning in a showroom in Durban opening and closing display doors like a mad woman, and I have never felt less embarrassed about anything, because the woman working there just brought me a chair and let me get on with it.

I learned that I wanted a long lever with a light action, that I wanted something I could open with a forearm when my hands were bad, that brushed finishes hide the marks that shiny ones do not, and that the weight of a thing in the hand tells you almost everything about how it will feel on a February morning when your knuckles are angry. I ended up ordering most of the door handles online in the end, but only after I had held their cousins in a shop and knew exactly what I was asking for.

The bathroom, which I had been avoiding

The doors took me about three months, on and off, because I was doing them one at a time and paying my neighbour's son on the weekends he was free.

The bathroom took me a year to even face.

Part of that is money. Part of it is that a bathroom is not a door. A door is a small confession. A bathroom is a whole renovation, with a plumber in it, and dust, and a week of washing at your daughter's flat.

What made me finally do it was a small and stupid thing. I dropped a bottle of shampoo into the gap behind the pedestal and I could not get it out, and I sat on the closed toilet lid and laughed until I was not laughing.

I wanted a basin with a proper counter next to it so that I could put a thing down without gripping it. I wanted a drawer instead of a cupboard, because a drawer comes to you and a cupboard makes you go into it on your knees. I wanted a tap I could move with the back of my wrist. When I started looking at bathroom vanities I realised how much of what is sold is designed to be photographed rather than lived in, and how many beautiful things I would have to walk past to find the one with the drawer at the right height.

I found it eventually. It is not the prettiest one I saw. It is the one that works. The drawer runs on a soft close, which sounds like an indulgence and is not, because a drawer you have to shove is a drawer you will stop using.

What my daughter said

She came to see it when it was done. She is not a sentimental person. She walked around the house opening doors, which is a strange thing to watch someone do, and she went into the bathroom and pulled the drawer out and pushed it shut, and pulled it out and pushed it shut.

Then she said, "You should have done this five years ago."

And I said, "I know."

And she said, "Why didn't you?"

I have thought about the honest answer to that a lot. The honest answer is that changing the handles felt like agreeing with the disease. It felt like signing something. As long as I was fighting the brass mushroom on the kitchen cupboard every day, I was still the woman who used to be able to open jars.

That is a completely mad way to think, and I suspect it is also very common. I have a friend who would not put a rail in her shower for two years for the same reason, and she fell, and then she put in the rail.

The morning test

Here is my test now, and I offer it to anybody in the same boat, because nobody offered it to me.

Go and stand in your own house early in the morning, on a cold day, before the coffee, when your body is at its worst. Then just try to open everything. Doors, cupboards, the cabinet, the window, the burglar gate, the tin of coffee itself. Not with your good hand. Not with the trick you have taught yourself. Just try it, honestly, and notice every place where your body has to make an adjustment.

Then write those down and fix them one at a time, cheapest first, because the handles are the cheap part and the confidence you get back from them is completely out of proportion to what they cost.

The bathroom cost me real money. The doors cost me a few weekends and the price of a decent dinner out.

But it is the doors I notice. Every single time I come home now, I open my front door with the side of my hand, without thinking, without negotiating, and I walk into my own house like it belongs to me.

Which, as it turns out, it does.