'Grieving the loss of my mom...I cut out everyone—except for my massage therapist. A year of weekly treatments revealed the complicated and essential nature of human touch' .AnnaRHaines on grief and the Asian immigrant workers who heal us
A Yelp search for the “best massage in Park Slope” led me to a neon yellow sign of a smiling foot. The door chimed as I entered a room with four beds divided by makeshift bamboo walls. Shelves of grinning gold cats waved their hands in sync while I waited. I had come for a one-off, inexpensive massage. But I knew within 10 minutes I would want another, despite feeling embarrassed that, as a half-Asian woman, I couldn’t communicate with my Chinese-speaking masseuse Lulu beyond gestures.
Rather than spend my Saturday night at some loud bar skirting around my mom’s death with someone I swiped right on, I chose the sheltered booths of my local massage clinic. With Lulu, I never needed to explain myself—all I had to do was breathe. The synchronicity between each knead into my flesh and exhale of my breath became our own language; a form of physical exchange that never led to rejection or abandonment. It was the one place where I felt safe and supported.
“What does it feel like to lose sensation in the hand you used the most?” I would nag my mom as a teenager. It was her left hand that was paralyzed—the one that had supported the melody on the piano and written spontaneous observations of single motherhood on napkins. When Lulu pressed into my dominant right palm, I pictured all the nerves under my skin sparking and connecting, where my mom’s cells were a sea of darkness, lost within the swollen flesh of her curled, limp hand.
But like any good relationship, mine with Lulu had to end—an expired visa saw me heading home to Canada. Following my last appointment with Lulu, I tried to explain I was leaving. I wanted to tell her she made me feel safe and loved when my grief had prevented me from dating like most young adults my age. I needed her to know she gave me the mother’s touch I longed for since the age of eight, the last time my mom had given me a two-armed hug.
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