Hugs, Kisses, and Last Moments

The tender connection of touch, whether I know it's the last time or not

Last Saturday, we attended a memorial service for a friend, a glowing sunbeam of a man who died in July. He had that rare quality of caring attention that could, as a mutual friend described it, “make you feel hugged without hugging”—and a warm actual hug typically followed.

Annette and I learned about his illness late in its trajectory, in part because we’d hit the pause button on attending church last winter, something we’ve done from time to time over the years for various reasons. We felt awful that we hadn’t been there for him. When we walked into his room at the veterans’ hospital the next weekend, instead of expressing disappointment at our absence, he greeted us with a radiant smile and asked how we were doing. I felt deep gratitude—and longed for the conversations I’d missed by not knowing sooner.

The last time we saw him was when we dropped off a meal for him and his family at their home before leaving on a trip. He was awake, so we had a chance to talk and laugh, hold his hand, and hug. We knew it might be the last time we did, and it was. Even though we got back home before he passed, we both had COVID, which prevented us from seeing him again.

A handful of other times, I’ve known I was touching a person for the last time, like when Aunt Kathy asked Uncle Earl to organize a family reunion so she could see everyone. Relatives gathered at their home in Pennsylvania, arriving from New York, New Jersey, and Virginia. Throughout the day, we took turns sitting on the edge of Aunt Kathy’s hospital bed in their living room, squeezing her hand, touching her arm, kissing her cheek, telling stories, laughing, listening, crying. She died that night.

More often I’ve had no idea I was sharing my last hug or kiss with someone, and sometimes, looking back, regretted the hurried or distracted nature of our last connection.

A few months after her husband Kurt Brown died unexpectedly, my mentor Laure-Anne Bosselaar discovered, in a file of unpublished “almost poems” on his computer, a small poem written about six weeks before his death entitled “The Kiss.” 

It begins,

That kiss I failed to give you.
How can you forgive me? 

I wept when I read it, wept for the love, regret, and tenderness the poem conveys, wept as I imagined the swirl that must have engulfed Laure-Anne as those five lines surfaced, rising on the screen like an incoming tide. The next year, the poem opened a posthumous collection of Kurt’s work, and later, Guernica published an article by Laure-Anne in which she described reading it for the first time.

Growing up in an affectionate family, I’ve always loved hugs and kisses, from the bear hugs my burly, bearded Uncle Hap gave to my grandmother’s soft, squishy ones that left a lingering scent of White Shoulders perfume. Whenever we said goodbye after a visit, she’d shower us with hugs and kisses and then choke up, tears sliding down her cheeks as Dad backed out of her and Pop’s driveway in Florida. She’d wave, and we’d wave back until we couldn’t see her anymore, although I could picture her tucking the damp tissue into her sleeve.

Once I embraced my lesbian identity, I grew especially fond of a new kind of kiss, one that smolders and sparks like a lit fuse. Back in eighth grade, I’d wondered if such kisses really existed or if writers invented them for readers like me who hid Harlequin romances behind an upturned textbook in Health class. I can still hear the chalky thud of an eraser hitting my desk when the teacher noticed I wasn’t paying attention, at least not to him.

Nowadays, amid lives joyfully busy with friends, family, work, writing, church, and chores, kisses keep Annette and I connected, whether it’s a fleeting kiss while she washes dishes or a lingering welcome-home kiss after one of us returns from a trip.

I love kissing her. The tender softness of her lips, the pressure and whisper of the kiss itself, the quickening of breath and heartbeat. Am I thinking, when we kiss, that this might be our last? No. I just want to take it all in.

I can recall, however, kisses heightened by a sense of mortality—after she drove through a terrible storm, or I arrived home on the day a shooting shattered a graduation within walking distance of my school, or we heard news of a woman in Tennessee who was baking cookies when floodwaters catapulted her home from its foundation and who lost her husband when their house broke apart in the current. Sometimes, being able to kiss each other again feels like a small miracle.

I like to imagine that if we know we’re kissing for the last time, we will kiss like the couple Ellen Bass writes about in Gate C-22, a poem which includes these lines midway through:

                           We were all watching—
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling 
sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could 
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

I recognize that this is hopelessly optimistic. It’s also unlikely we’d share that kind of traffic-stopping kiss in public.

Hugging after our first kiss as a legally married couple.

Wherever we are, I want to bring an intense presence to the kiss, to her. I want to taste the kiss in my mouth and feel it in my bones—so I can carry it in my marrow.

It’s more likely neither of us will know which kiss is our last.

Thus, I’ll learn from Kurt’s words, allowing each kiss that pulses within me to find her: platonic kisses, silly, haphazard kisses that make us smile, and ones that make us forget to breathe—giving them with a full heart and my full attention.

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The poems for your pocket until the next post are the two poems named in this post (if you didn’t read them already, I encourage you to read them now): “The Kiss” by Kurt Brown and “Gate C-22” by Ellen Bass.

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