There was never a time in my life when I didn’t play the piano. At least none my memory can recall. When most kids were focusing on the alphabet and counting to ten and staying dry overnight, I was sitting on a piano bench, feet dangling above the ground, snuggled up to my mother’s side as she wrapped us in a cocoon of beautiful music.
It was my mother’s love language.
She wrote songs for my dad. She wrote songs for my grandparents. She wrote songs for me. And at the very end, she wrote songs for Jesus. It was an odd shift, especially since we weren’t a religious family. We never went to church on Sundays. Not because we didn’t think God existed, but simply because it had never been a part of our life. My mother’s spiritual awakening in her last days wasn’t something that would comfort me until many years later.
Supposedly, she wrote me a song on my third birthday, and when she played it, I pranced around the living room in a pink tutu, flapping my arms like a butterfly. Then I climbed onto that bench and asked her to teach me.
So she did. “Chopsticks” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” eventually turned into Für Elise and the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. Her love language became my love language—the way we not only expressed our feelings, but processed them. As my mother got sicker and sicker, her music turned lighter and lighter, and mine? It became angry and dark, frantic and loud. Filled with dissonance.
Because I wasn’t ready to lose her.
She was supposed to be there for my prom and my high school graduation. She was supposed to help me pick out a college. Celebrate with me when I got engaged. She was supposed to help me plan my wedding and gush over my dress and blot her tears when I walked down the aisle. All my life, I had counted on her being there. I never contemplated her absence. Until radiation stole her hair and chemo stole her energy and all I could do was contemplate it.
Mom didn’t try to talk me out of this dark musical period I went through. She sat and listened while I pounded out Black Mass Sonata and Mozart’s Requiem and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. When she finally went, I covered the piano she left to me with a black sheet and didn’t touch it for a year. I couldn’t bring myself to play, not when she wasn’t there to hear.
For a year, my love language ran dry. I thought I’d start playing once it came back. I didn’t realize it was the playing that made it flow.