Love at the Center

In my work as an evidential medium, I talk to many fathers who have passed to the other side.  Many times my clients are happy and relieved to hear from their dad, but that’s not always the case.  More often than one would hope, a man comes through with an apology to his child.  What can at first be an awkward or painful reunion ends up being an opportunity for healing to take place on both sides of the veil.

My dad has visited me several times since his passing in 2008 at age 92, and I have welcomed each visit with joy.  I love my dad dearly, and that love has always been reciprocated.  Each time that I have sensed his  spirit's presence, I’ve asked him to tell me something that is going on with my mother that I don’t know about.  With this validation, she and the rest of my family know for sure that he really visited me.  He has always provided excellent verifiable evidence, like the time he told me to talk to my mother about her electric curlers, telling me that something was wrong with them.  I called Mom immediately, and she told me that she had cleaned her closet the day before and found her old electric curlers, but they didn’t work anymore.  Way to go, Dad!

If you’ve read my memoir, Messages of Hope, you’ll recall the reading I had in which my Dad came through quite clearly.  I knew for sure he was there when he said to the medium, “Just call me Bill.”  It was the first thing my father would say whenever anyone learned that his real name was Oliver.  Dad was named after his father, Oliver L. Smeltzer, but everyone in his family had always called him “Bill.”  Dad thought this was better than being called “Junior.”

The origin of Dad’s name is actually quite interesting:  O.L. Smeltzer Senior’s father lived close to the family of a Mr. Oliver Love.  Supposedly, somebody in Oliver Love’s family saved somebody in our great grandfather’s family from drowning, and Great Granddaddy named his sixth son after Oliver Love.   

When I sat to meditate this morning, my gaze fell on the desk across the room.  On it sits a foot-long wooden carving of the word “Love.”  It is always the last thing I see before I close my eyes to enter the silence, and for some reason, today I thought of Dad.  I recalled that his father died of tuberculosis when he was 8.  When the depression hit, at age 14 he was sent to live and work at the Milton Hershey School for Boys (yes, THE Milton Hershey of Hershey’s Chocolate fame, for whom Dad later served as personal assistant). 

It could not have been an easy childhood, yet Dad never let on about it. I have no memories of my dad ever uttering a critical word to me.  They say women often marry men like their fathers, and I can be rightly accused of that.  Like my husband, Ty, my dad was never anything less than fully supportive of anything I wanted to do, and he never hid his love for me. 

This morning, when looking at that wooden carving of the word “Love,” for the first time ever I realized “his middle name was Love.”  I had always known this in a literal sense, but I never thought of it in the metaphorical sense.  It wasn’t something we talked about.  For some reason, Dad was ashamed of that middle name.  We know this because he always insisted that the “L” was just an initial.  It was only after my brother started doing genealogy as an adult that he discovered my father had a middle name.   

Perhaps it was his difficult childhood that left my dad uncomfortable with overt displays of affection around anyone other than his immediate family.  Perhaps that is why he disliked his middle name.  I may never know the real reason for his discomfort.  What I do know is that he and my mother—who also had a challenging childhood—found a deep and enduring love with each other, and they passed that love on to their children.  It is a gift for which I am eternally grateful.

As I’ve learned from reuniting so many adult children with their fathers, the gift of love is transformational.  Receiving that love from across the veil, whether it comes from the wispy gesture of a hug, a kiss, or a head bowed in apology, can reignite the love within.  That love lives in each of us, but for some reason—perhaps from grief, from guilt, or from some other human emotion—it burns less brightly in some than in others. 

My father’s middle name was Love.  It is my hope that these words ignite in your soul the remembrance that Love is your middle name, too.  No matter what kind of childhood you had, no matter if those around you failed to realize that their middle name was also Love, may you leave a legacy of love for all those whose lives you touch.