The "L" Word

I got a box from my father's attic in the mail today. It had music that Marshall sent to our father in it, along with several pieces of music that I had sent him over the years. The pieces from Marshall were accompanied by letters that included birthday greetings.

The music has clearly never played. Neither his music nor mine.

One of the pieces was Marshall's Bass Sonata, which I ended up finding the music for several years after he died. During the last afternoon I spent with my father, we listened to the performance of the piece together (linked to above). I'm not sure what it meant to my father, but it meant a lot to me.

I will go through the rest of the music and get everything, particularly the physically larger pieces, properly scanned into PDF files, and then submit them to the IMSLP. Among other things, there's a concerto for two violas, and a viola concerto that look very interesting.

Reading the letters made me realize how desperately Marshall wanted to know that our father loved him. Our father never used "the L word." Now I wonder if he simply lacked the ability to love. He could be charming, clever, and even kind, but expressing love in spoken or written language was not part of who he was.

Marshall was drawn to the kind of "fatherly" love that is promised in Christianity, but my younger brother and I managed to find other ways to cope with the absence of paternal love in our lives.

I wonder how much of the dysfunction in the world has to do with people who, like my father, are unable to express love to the people closest to them. Maybe my father didn't use the word because he felt it was a false expression. Perhaps if love was something that my father was unable to feel, it was something that didn't really exist. And if he used the word, it would be a lie. My father was never good at lying.

I have experience with the use of the word love to manipulate and deceive. And I know that love can be obsessive, particularly when it is unrequited. (What else do we use the term "unrequited" for?)

For some people the pain of losing someone you love is the pain of losing love itself, and then comes the dread of living in a world without love. I know that the ability to let someone go, as in accepting the inevitability of someone's death, is an act of love. I experienced that together with my father when Marshall died.

The last thing I said to Marshall before he died was that I loved him.

I suppose I really learned how to love through knowing I was loved. I was so fortunate to meet Michael when I did, and am grateful that in our life together we have been able to have a relationship where the phrase "I love you" is part of our daily household vocabulary.

When our first child was born, her ability to love was beyond anything I had ever experienced. And then our second child taught us even more ways of expressing deep love. Both of our children have taught me how to love deeply and organically. The ability to love that both of them demonstrate as parents fills me with admiration and awe on a daily basis.

That I spent my childhood in a family that didn't express or recognize love and have been able to spend my adulthood in a family filled with feelings and expressions of love is really something to celebrate.