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Article snippet: I had thought about reaching for my father’s hand for weeks. He was slowly dying in a nursing home, and no one who visited him — from my mother, his wife of 42 years, to my three siblings — held his hand. How do you reach for something that, for so many decades, hinted at violence and, worse, dismissal? In the flickering gray from the old black-and-white movies we watched together, I finally did it. I touched my father’s hand, which I hadn’t held since I was a young boy. His curled fingers opened, unhinging some long-sealed door within me, then lightly closed around mine. Before I left, I did something else none of the males in my family had ever done before. I leaned close to my father’s ear and whispered, “I love you.” Since then, I have learned that many middle-aged American men share this discomfort with reaching for another man’s hand. But experts say that nonsexual touching contributes to greater well-being. Touch is the first, and perhaps most profound, language we learn when we’re very young, says Tiffany Field, director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami School of Medicine. Touch might have a more immediate impact than words, Dr. Field said in an email, “because it is physical and leads to a chain of bioelectric and chemical changes that basically relax the nervous system.” The benefits of nonsexual touch read like a 19th-century tonic advertisement, except that the outcomes have been scientifically vetted. Touch has been found, a... Link to the full article to read more