LOVE COMMUNICATION
We lay on the pebbles, our faces turned towards the sun. Then she stretched her hands out towards the sun. I looked at her for a long time and thought for a moment.
“Everyone should have a friend like that, someone with whom they can both be childlike and talk about life. Someone they don’t know, who shares things selflessly and loves them in their purest form. Perhaps our hearts finally know who to trust…”
As the joyful shouts from afar mingled with the sound of the waves, I was reminded of my own childhood years.
During the summer holidays, we would wake up early in the mornings and buy bagels from the bakery. My mother and father would come to this beach. My mother would spread a rug on the ground and take out the breakfast items she had carefully prepared from the basket. My father was a very meticulous man. Everything in life, including the beach breakfast, had to be perfect according to him. He would always find an excuse, one way or another, to make my mother cry with his insults. Then he would get angry with us and go fishing 10 meters away. I remember my father would even yell and curse at the fish he couldn’t catch, angrily throwing pebbles he picked up from the ground at them. I would watch the children further down the beach, laughing and joking with their parents, swimming in the sea. My heart ached.
After many years, my father was diagnosed with kidney failure and began receiving treatment. Due to his anger, we changed dialysis centers four times.
It was a few weeks before he passed away. While hooked up to the dialysis unit, he held my hands and told me about his childhood memories. Witnessing those stories filled with beatings, violence, and torture was difficult. It was as if I was facing a little child who had never grown up, consumed by shame, struggling to face life with teary eyes. Since my grandmother had died of kidney failure at a young age, I had attributed my father’s attitude towards life to that pain in my own inner world. I had no idea that my father was an angry child, raised by an authoritarian father, surrounded by a culture of fear, torture, and beatings, and disillusioned with life.
I believe the greatest legacy one can leave a child is to raise them in an environment of love and trust. Many individuals, parents, teachers, and educators within unhealthy communication and relationship models, even if they are unaware of the variables that can fundamentally affect their own individual life awareness, should know this, I think.
That great potential, full of love, is out there somewhere. It’s waiting to be discovered tomorrow. We, even if only for a few weeks, were able to make that discovery with my father in the last days of his life.
Perhaps all we need to do is turn our faces to the sun and keep our hearts warm.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
With love and respect.
Uğur Uğural
