“Mothers always want to give,” Madeline Chance likes to say. But after her husband died and her children grew up and moved away, she had no one to give to. “The best thing you can do when you’re old is to be busy,” she says, “so I tried to volunteer everywhere.” But she still felt lonely. She grew depressed. When she heard about the study of massage and the elderly, she signed up. She had never had a massage before but found it soothing. Like most of the volunteers, she liked giving massage even more. “You miss all that—the touching,” she says quietly. It saddens her that things were so different when her children were young. “With my kids, I was told that you don’t touch them or you’ll spoil them,” she says. “Every four hours you fed them, and if they cried, you let them. That’s the way mothers were taught back then.” When the research program ended, Chance continued to come in to help massage the toddlers.

“Baby, would you like a massage?” she asked John, a chubby seven-month-old. John gurgles up at her. (“You always ask if they want a massage,” Chance explains, “and if the baby doesn’t like it at any time, you stop.”) She bend low over the child, her fingers gently stroking his back as she demonstrates the various techniques: the Indian milking stroke, the feathering stroke, the effleurage. Her tanned, wrinkled hands, with their abstract map of veins and tendons envelop the lush smoothness of the baby’s skin. John, who had been fussy, gradually relaxes, gives himself up. Chance, too had been tense. Now she begins to lose herself in her work. The baby grins a toothless smile and holds up his arm as if in ecstasy. Chance looks down at him and beams. Clearly, they are touching each other.