A father and no sons. Our daddy’s name will not be passed
on.
Since the birth of the Occident, the lineage of a family has
been handed down and inherited by its men. Each son, sickly or strong, is a
link in a chain that gives order and hopefully honor to generations. It is a
potent and persuading concept: to have a person as a marking for each stop in
the journey of man’s blood throughout the ages. As if to tell Time, “look, we
were here!”
We fear endings—there is often a profound sadness and
emptiness in them. The end of a “name” is, to our world, like the dried and
hardened tip of a broken flower. It is the fleshy and discolored remaining lump
from a lost limb. It is the severed trunk of a tree—with its long and steady
life laid out in intricate rings, but no sprout or twig from which it may
continue its existence. It has a life to it and as with all living things, it
too can die.
A name fastens us to this earth. In the beginning, God
tasked Adam with the naming of the animals and we have faithfully continued
this, now naming everything in Creation itself. By a name, we are both
individuals and parts of a collective whole. Consider what it would feel like
to be nameless—by choice and by nature. Would you still feel human?
But, my father does not mourn the loss of his name. No, he
is oddly delighted in this particular kind of “end.” For to him, the loss was a
gain—love took the place of blood. Where the phantom of his name might have
nestled into the initials of my children and their children, a sacred abundance
of love—with its smiling stories—will be present. He believes in passing on
blessings, not names. And so, in this way, his love for us has redefined the
very instinct that guides
the visceral man.
the visceral man.
In fact, through this act of sacrificial love, his name—his lineage—has
been transformed into more than simply a label. It has been reborn as something
that transcends Time and elevates the human: a legacy, born from a love that
detaches itself from this earth and the bounds of humanity’s weaknesses.
Ἡ ἀγάπη μακροθυμεῖ. For love is
long-suffering. It “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things,
endures all things.” It is the one thing that remains standing when all else has fallen—even a name.
A father and two daughters and a legacy.
