Skin to Skin

My brother sent this picture to our family’s group text last Friday:

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It set me WAY back and it has taken a week for me to be able to write about it. I don’t remember taking this picture and I don’t even know where we were at but using my deductive reasoning, I figured out a few things.

Obviously, I was in high school because I am wearing my uniform and my nails are done. That would mean I had to be 15 or 16 because it would have been Quinceaña season. I didn’t have one myself but I stood up in a number of them in high school. I am 37 now and was 24 when he died. As I looked over this picture and showed Sean, he noticed my thin eyebrows and told me that it was obvious that it was in the late 90s because they were so thin.

The most striking thing about this picture to me is that our foreheads are touching. I don’t even have to close my eyes to feel the feeling of his warm skin on mine. Touching. Skin to skin. I remember the last time I felt the warmth. I kissed his forehead and told him, “I love you, Daddy.”

I think that was a couple days before he died but on the day he died, before he left for the hospital for the last time, I was too afraid to kiss him goodbye myself. He looked too bad. I was afraid. I told Sean to run over and kiss him goodbye. The last memory I have of hearing him speak is hearing him calling my son, “Handsome.”

I remember being alone with him in the hospital room after he died and I kissed his forehead and what shocked and mortified me the most was that he was so cold! I didn’t kiss him ever again. I just couldn’t.

But seeing this picture made me remember the warmth of his forehead on mine, just skin to skin.