In my work as an evidential medium, I talk to many fathers
who have passed to the other side.  Many times my clients
are happy and relieved to hear from their dad, but that’s not always the case.  More often than one would hope, a man comes through
with an apology to his child.  What can
at first be an awkward or painful reunion ends up being an opportunity for
healing to take place on both sides of the veil.

My dad has visited me several times since his passing in 2008 at age 92, and I
have welcomed each visit with joy.  I love my dad
dearly, and that love has always been reciprocated.
Each time that I have sensed his  spirit’s presence, I’ve asked him to tell me something
that is going on with my mother that I don’t know about.  With this validation, she and the rest of my family
know for sure that he really visited me.
He has always provided excellent verifiable evidence, like the time he told me to talk to my mother
about her electric curlers, telling me that something was wrong with them.  I called Mom immediately, and she told me
that she had cleaned her closet the day before and found her old
electric curlers, but they didn’t work anymore.
Way to go, Dad!

If you’ve read my memoir, Messages of Hope, you’ll recall the reading I had in which my Dad
came through quite clearly.  I knew for
sure he was there when he said to the medium, “Just call me Bill.”  It was the first thing my father would say whenever
anyone learned that his real name was Oliver.
Dad was named after his father, Oliver L. Smeltzer, but everyone in his
family had always called him “Bill.”  Dad thought this was better than being
called “Junior.”

The origin of Dad’s name is actually quite interesting:  O.L. Smeltzer Senior’s father lived close to
the family of a Mr. Oliver Love.  Supposedly, somebody in
Oliver Love’s family saved somebody in our great grandfather’s family from
drowning, and Great Granddaddy named his sixth son after Oliver Love.

When I sat to meditate this morning, my gaze fell on the
desk across the room.  On it sits a foot-long
wooden carving of the word “Love.”  It is
always the last thing I see before I close my eyes to enter the silence, and
for some reason, today I thought of Dad.
I recalled that his father died of tuberculosis when he was 8.  When the
depression hit, at age 14 he was sent to live and work at the Milton Hershey
School for Boys (yes, THE Milton Hershey of Hershey’s Chocolate fame, where
Dad later worked for a while before going to work for the Pennsylvania railroad).

It could not have been an easy childhood, yet Dad never let on about it. I have no memories of my dad ever
uttering a critical word to me.
They say women often marry men like their fathers, and I can be rightly
accused of that.  Like my husband, Ty, my
dad was never anything less than fully supportive of anything I wanted to do, and
he never hid his love for me.

This morning, when looking at that wooden carving of the word
“Love,” for the first time ever I realized “his middle
name was Love
.”  I had always known this
in a literal sense, but I never thought of it in the metaphorical sense.  It wasn’t something we talked about.  For some reason, Dad was ashamed of that
middle name.  We know this because he always
insisted that the “L” was just an initial.
It was only after my brother started doing genealogy as an adult that he
discovered my father had a middle name.

Perhaps it was his difficult childhood that left my dad
uncomfortable with overt displays of affection around anyone other than his
immediate family.  Perhaps that is why he
disliked his middle name.
I may never know the real reason for his discomfort.  What I do know is that he and my mother—who also
had a challenging childhood—found a deep and enduring love with each other, and they passed that
love on to their children.  It is a gift
for which I am eternally grateful.

As I’ve learned from reuniting so many adult children with
their fathers, the gift of love is transformational.  Receiving that love from across the veil,
whether it comes from the wispy gesture of a hug, a kiss, or a head bowed in
apology, can reignite the love within.
That love lives in each of us, but for some reason—perhaps from grief, from
guilt, or from some other human emotion—it burns less brightly in some than in
others.

My father’s middle name was Love.  It is my hope that these words ignite in your soul the remembrance that Love is your middle name, too.
No matter what kind of childhood you had, no matter if those around you failed
to realize that their middle name was also Love, may you leave a legacy of love
for all those whose lives you touch.