Sunday, April 3, 2016

Foreheads

I've been thinking about foreheads a lot lately. Specifically, I've been focusing on how we express unspoken love for each other by touching our forehead to another person's forehead. There is a television commercial airing these days where an adult child touches her forehead to her father's in an expression of unspoken love as her father's caregiver. One of my favorite movies features the hero and heroine not embraced in a kiss, but gently, silently pressing their foreheads together. When my late mom was in the dying process, sometimes words were too difficult, so we would simply be silent and touch foreheads. We would stay locked in that moment until the unspoken words seemed to have been conveyed between our touching foreheads. It got me to thinking about what an amazing gesture it is to touch the forehead of another person's with your own, how the intimacy of such a gesture requires no words, for the love seems to transfer without the need to grasp for language, which can at times feel so inadequate. Words may be powerful, but the touch of our foreheads, I've decided, can be equally if not more so.