Love Letters: In Defense of Caring: a Few Words about my Dad
In the weeks and months after my Dad died, I thought: something will catch my eye, surely. A sign? I hoped so.
The problem was that, instead, my eye caught everything. My dog’s grin, snaggle-toothed and crooked; a beloved cello student venturing into ornamenting for the first time – in Bach 5th Suite, no less! – and coming up with something breathtaking and personal; the first strawberries of the year – tiny, sweet, so delicate they’d burst if you looked at them askance. Every time I stopped the car at a red light and looked at a house number nearby, it said 127…or 464, 960, 38,102, 77. Receipts read $131, license plates said 133, and the cardinals in my backyard were so red, so plump and impractical in their beauty, that I looked on in astonishment.
There would be no signs, I realized, because my entire life was already filled – in astonishing, technicolor detail – by things that my Dad loved, things he noticed, things that made him cry.
Dad loved his Scotch single-malt, so tender it went down like poetry, the flavor – with a tiny flick of water pirouetting on top – blooming and singing as he threw back his head and laughed. He loved bluefish, black cod, swordfish, tuna belly: flesh so meltingly delicate it pooled on the tongue like butter, fish so sublime it could, did, make Dad cry. He adored Sichuan peppercorns and fermented black bean pastes, star anise and sesame oil; and delighted in his more-newly-beloved gochujang, doenjang, and fish sauce, his huge hands wrapping around his cell phone to call me and whisper what a revelation it all was: You don’t need much! But whew! Does that add something! He read books about people in love and people at war, about enslaved Black people in the American South and Jews in the camps, about art and hauntings, basketball and wolves: novel after novel, Dad weeping fat tears as the pages emblazoned themselves on his infinite, insatiable heart. Those things other people might find practical were instead for beauty: a Swiss Army knife to construct score-parts, light bulbs to better thrill over pages of Dickens, Himalayan pink salt to season a piece of meat because it was the most poetic choice.
His life was crying at Mozart’s changing a single note in the bass line and how the magic of that choice transcended understanding; it was crying, too, at pasta cooked al dente, at vegetables treated with proper reverence, at clams so fresh your nose crinkled with saltwater as they slid down your throat. He cried at the meeting of two characters he’d come to love in a book; at the irrepressible, exuberant, bottomless love of our dogs; at describing to me, as he lay in a hospital bed, my Mom’s miraculous, heart-stopping beauty, and how he could possibly have had the luck to love this person for his lifetime.
Dad was, in his heart of hearts, an optimist. He was an angry optimist! (Mom and Joshand I have laughed about this, glad that no one outside our tiny nucleus knew the true depth and chasm of his fury.) But his anger stemmed, almost invariably, from that optimism itself: from the ways that human beings disappoint and harm each other; from a performance not meaningful enough at the hands of a cavalier attitude; at the horror of overcooking a promising piece of poultry, dreams of supple meat and shattering skin destroyed by the whim of an inaccurate thermometer. His anger was at the very notion that people could somehow not care.
So he spent his decades here, instead, caring deeply: soaring through Beethoven quartets and sunsets; raging through genocides and badly-written passagework; basking in reverent love at moments huge and small with our beloved family; exalting as he voyaged and sparred with his dearest colleagues of the JSQ; whooping as he cheered on his magnificent students.
In short: Dad knew, in the moment, that life is a miracle, and fought passionately to be worthy of it. For those of us who miss him, achingly so, there are his favorite grapefruits – the Oro Blancos, white-fleshed, fragrant, and perfumed – and seed-crunchy crackers; crystalline-poetic bites of aged Gouda and soy-braised short ribs so tender they dissolve like memory. There are the hundred, thousand, infinite moments of Shapey, Bartók, Carter, Mozart, Webern, and Beethoven that leave us in awe; there are books: all the ones he loved, and all those that he would have. There are our dogs, who look up still with raw tenderness when they hear the cello; and my Mom, who wears their jade wedding stones and forever love; there are Josh and me, who sometimes contain such echoes of Dad – an arched eyebrow here, a chewy turn of phrase there – that looking in the mirror aches a little. There are his students, each one of whom gave him hope, belief, and affirmation of that electric, wild joy that was so purely, exquisitely his.
Years ago, I heard Dad coaching a quartet, talking – as he did – about ways to make the music so vivid that an audience could not miss its meaning. “It should be tattooed to my forehead,” he said, “because I’m going to have to remember it – emotionally.” Those of us who have been lucky enough to study with him heard him talk a lot about this structural, motivic etching: the ways that, when we sculpt, inflect, and wear it on our hearts just so, the music can be – in Dad’s words – alive and in the room.
Dad is now, himself, imprinted on us in that very way he described. It is true for you and me; for our dogs – Anya, Matzo, Fredo; for my brother and my Mom; for Dad’s colleagues and students across his lifetime; for the nurses who fell in love with him and for his dear friend Mike who drove him to work every day. It is so for all the people with whom he shared great books and music, uproarious laughter, deep love, and transcendent food over the better part of a century. For all of us, forever, Dad is tattooed to our foreheads: to nudge us when we lose heart or hope or will – when we need a glimpse of all that matters, and how staggeringly much.
– Gwen Krosnick, December 2025