The Look of (Unconditional) Love
:: Apr 4, 11:14 PM

Echoing through the apartment of my friend Anders’ house in Copenhagen was Dusty Springfield’s “The Look of Love.” He gave this song to me as an mp3 three years ago before he moved out of Tokyo. I was visiting Anders in Copenhagen and I sat there surfing the web on his laptop until I felt a sudden spell of sleepiness fall over me. I turned in at 8:40 pm.

That was last night.

I wake up now at 5:49am with an imprinted impression in my head of how my dad’s face looked when I looked back over my shoulder towards his hospital bed as I was leaving him. I would stop by after work, three to four times a week in those days. And every time, it was that moment, as I walked away from him, that I wanted to last forever.

I never really knew what unconditional love meant until I lost it when my dad passed away. It wasn’t the kind of “lost” where you misplace something, but it was the lost where it was gone. And this particular thing was gone before I even knew it was there. When he died, it was like the sofa and chairs in my house suddenly had their cushions stolen. Knowing he was there and rooting for me, I felt my life could be idle, but still be validated by the fact that he acknowledged my existence. Perhaps that is the father-daughter bond that I was privileged enough to experience. He found my jokes funny, my opinions relevant and in his eyes, my personality was defined purely on my thoughts. I felt the same way about him. He was never boring or inarticulate, although more than many times annoying and stubborn. There were no filters obscuring our communication that no matter how annoying we were to each other, our unconditional bond never faltered.

Now with death between us, I still feel an unconditional bond, but there’s only a pitcher, me. It’s like one pipe out of which I communicate love has been stifled with duct tape with all of my messages lodged against the sticky side.

Maybe if I have kids that tape would peel off they’d be there to absorb my backed up messages. But they wouldn’t get all of them. Some of them would still be stuck on the tape. And some of them would be inapplicable.

When I would look back over my shoulder at my dad’s face, as he sat there, propped up on his hospital bed, we both had eyes brimming with pride and love. I could see through those eyes straight to love. And I knew that love existed as long as one of us was alive – either to emit or receive.

I forgot to tell Anders that I put Dusty’s “The Look of Love” on the last CD compilation I gave my dad.

written in Copenhagen on April 4, 2009