Once there was a man who loved music, and he loved his wife, and he loved his son. When he was a child, his grandfather gave him his violin, but the boy did not know how to play it, so he played with it as a toy. Eventually, he grew tired of playing with the violin and left it to lie in closets and attics, to pop up from time to time like a memory.
As the man grew old his sight dimmed, and darkened, and faded away. The man cursed his useless eyes, because he could no longer see the sun rise in the morning, no longer see the love in his wife�s eyes, no longer see his son grown into a man. But when his wife took ill, and withered away, the man blessed his useless eyes, that at least he would be spared the sight of her suffering. And when she died, he was comforted that at least he did not have to see the sun rise, as if it were just another morning, and not the end of the world.
It was not that he wished to die after losing her, but that he did not know how to live any more. He puttered around in his memories, lost to all the world, except when his son would visit. Then he would recount the treasures he had found in his memories to his son, having taken great care to dig them out and polish them like diamonds, gems of a long life. And the son came to know his parents better in those days than he ever had growing up with them. For the man kept his wife alive in his memories, and in the telling of their life together to his son, in that way she had never left him, nor their house, nor the earth.
One day while wandering through his memories, the man�s hands came to know again the violin. He thought of how foolish he had been to never have learned how to play it. Of course, it is too late now, he thought, but nevertheless took it with him and sat it down on his bed side table. In the morning, he picked it up, and thinking how shabby it must look, he polished it absent mindedly the whole day. As time went on he restrung it, and kept it in tune, but he never played it. Keeping it was like keeping a memory by his side, but to play it would be something new, a break with the past which he would not even think of.
However, fate was not yet finished with the man, and one day he received a call that his son had died. And on that day, his memory died as well, for the man no longer knew how to live in the past without being able to tell of it to his son. He felt like he was falling, had been falling for a long time. It would not be right to say that he felt grief, he was grief and nothing more. But he could not lament, he could not cry out with his hoarse voice, he could only weep in his sleep. Weep, and fall, night and day.
All day he held on his lap the violin, as if it were the only thing left in all the world that was real, the only memory that would not stray. At night it lay on the bedside table, where he might reach out in the night, and be comforted that it was still there. And every day was worse than the last, and every day he felt it growing inside of him, and he spent each day waiting for it to burst. But each day came and went just like the last, and there was no end.
As he sat in a reverie, he heard the music he had been waiting his whole life to hear. It was sad, it was beautiful, it was striving with each upsweep to touch something just out of reach, and falling short, rose up to touch it again. He listened, feeling every note, anticipating every change, and it came to him only slowly, that it was the violin in his hands crying out instead of his soul--for his soul. He was playing the violin, and somehow everything he had gone through, his entire life, had been a prelude to this song.
� - 1996 Troy W. Pierce