Some goodbyes take years to arrive. This morning, mine came with strings attached.
The air felt heavier than usual this morning as I sat in my home, waiting for the orchestra director from the high school where my father had taught for so many years to arrive. Beside me rested his two violins: the shiny full-sized violin he had cherished all his life, and my ¾-sized violin from childhood, which had once been his. The faint scent of varnished wood drifted through the room, carrying memories in its wake, and I could almost hear him, bow in hand, coaxing life from the strings, drawing music out of thin air in the family living room.
My father had been a virtuoso from the start, recognized as a prodigy in the mid 1920s. But he was also a young boy who dreamed of playing baseball, a dream his parents worried might endanger his musical promise. So he played the violin instead, and his skill became both a defining part of his legacy and a thread woven throughout my youth.
I could still see him tuning his violin, running the bow across the strings, turning the pegs with patient care, coaxing each note to perfect pitch. Then he would play, Beethoven, Brahms, and other great composers’ scores, his fingers trembling in vibrato along the ebony neck to fill our living room with music that seemed to breathe and pulse.
Music had been woven into our family’s fabric. My older brother began on the violin, then moved to the piano, playing at Carnegie Hall with a full orchestra at just seven years of age. I followed, studying the violin when I was seven, before turning to the guitar, an easier instrument for me to play. We were a musical family not by obligation, but by our genetic — a gift, which sometimes created the quiet pressure to attain my father’s musical brilliance.
I can still picture the entryway table with his violin stretched out upon it, next to sores of photographs at my dad’s service two decades ago and how it served as a silent tribute to his life. In the background, violin music played softly: Massenet’s Thais Meditation, one of his favorite pieces, and later in the auditorium, the soul-stirring Theme from Schindler’s List. That haunting beauty filled the room, bringing both comfort and tears. It felt like my father’s music was still there, speaking through the violin scores one last time.
Keeping the Memories Encased
I had kept the two violins for many years, cradled in their old, worn cases long after my music lessons and our family gatherings became echoes of the past. The full-sized violin had always been sacred, touched by my father’s hands, singing his joys and sometimes sadness. The smaller one, his when he was a boy, carried a different nostalgia: my own childhood struggle to follow the notes, pretending to read the sheet music on the stand while playing by ear, awkward and fumbling, until I was apprehended by the old music teacher, a moment that ended my career as a violinist.
That morning, as I prepared to hand over the instruments one for donation, one for a gratis appraisal, my heart tangled with sadness, pride, gratitude, and relief. Letting go of my father’s violin felt like saying goodbye again, but also like setting the melodies free, allowing them to live on. Knowing that his violin will sing once more in the hands of young students, in the very school where he had taught, gave me comfort. The smaller antique violin would be appraised and I’d get to hold on to it as piece of my youth and yearning.
Perhaps that is what legacy truly means: to pass on what we revere so others can learn and grow. As I watched the orchestra director drive away with the two violins, the morning transformed from loss into something more enduring: a continuation of music, memory, and love. In that moment, I realized that the old violins carried not only my father’s hands and heart, but also their makers, and the echoes of every lesson, every note, every afternoon filled with practice and striving. My father’s violin carries a history that can now inspire new hands, new hearts, new lives.
And in letting go, I understood that legacy is not only about preservation, but about about trust: the trust to release what we hold most dearly so it may live on, speak, and resound in ways we cannot quite imagine as portrayed in the Oscar-winning movie The Red Violin. Â As his car disappeared down the street, I felt a quiet relief and an unexpected joy: the music would continue, carrying pieces of my father into the future.
