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" My mother has never been one to play about with airy signs of affection. She doesn&amp;#039;t flirt or dabble at love. If she hugs you, she means it. That must account for my bias against blown kisses, which have always struck me as being rather coy. My view softened when my 8-year-old daughter began to incorporate one into her bedtime ritual. I don&amp;#039;t know what prompted her to make a blown kiss the last thing she does before I leave her room. But, coming from her, I know that it is the real thing. Still, it was another blown kiss that changed my idea of what such a gesture could contain \u2014 and it sprang from the unlikeliest pair of lips: my mother&amp;#039;s.  It occurred last summer, after her surgery for ovarian cancer. She had just been transferred back to a regular hospital room from intensive care, but was still &amp;quot;in pieces,&amp;quot; as she put it semi-coherently. She was so incapacitated, she needed to have her dry mouth moistened for her \u2014 she could not manage to hold the swab and put it to her own mouth. In the next bed, behind a curtain, lay another woman who was about to be taken to surgery. We&amp;#039;d gathered from the conversation of the family and doctor that her situation was grave, much worse than my mother&amp;#039;s. Eventually, a nurse brought her out from behind the curtain and wheeled her past the end of my mother&amp;#039;s bed, toward the door. There was a bit of confusion, people clearing a path. I myself was unsure where to look \u2014 away, perhaps, to afford her some privacy. My gaze traveled over the patient&amp;#039;s head, toward my mother&amp;#039;s bed. My mother was looking straight at her. And with her hand that was too weak even to moisten her own mouth, she blew this woman a kiss.  It took my breath away to recognize the depth of love in the gesture, the kinship and strength, and also resistance. Because in the context of the hospital, the tubes and monitors, the statistics and pathologies and prognoses, my mother&amp;#039;s kiss seemed an almost rebellious affirmation of humanity. And possibility. I&amp;#039;m not talking about surviving the surgery, and the cancer (although of course that possibility, however slim for this woman, existed). I&amp;#039;m talking about the possibility \u2014 already blooming in that moment \u2014 of contact with another human being across a great empty space.  Just before her wheelchair disappeared around the corner, the woman \u2014 small, dark, in her 50s \u2014 raised her own hand and blew a kiss back. They never exchanged a word, she and my mother \u2014 they hadn&amp;#039;t even exchanged names \u2014 and I do not know whether anyone else in the room caught what had passed between them. But in that moment, I knew my mother to be more brave and passionate than I had even guessed. Leah Hager Cohen is the author of House Lights. She writes about her mom&amp;#039;s continuing journey at leahhagercohen.com. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/inspirational-stories/a17464/blessings-blowing-kisses-0707/>