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Show We or two later, confused and unfulfilled. It took a letter to express - very articulately what it cost him to lose his father so inexplicably at the age of seven. Beautiful words, flowing phrases to tell told what it is like to grow up without a father, with only the ghost of a hero or a cloud-like example, wispy and obfuscating. Only a very intelligent man can so clinically describe what it means to want identity and to look for an ideal and find only a gaping black hole. Still, the letter was delicate, careful. Oh, how I would have loved you Father - if I could have loved you. He'd not even had what we, his most neglected plural-family children had» the example, however remote, of a life well-lived, of a personage steeped in integrity,- strength and principle. That Principle. My father had written back, another careful letter to explain that he had not wished for the divorce. It was difficult to explain his commitment to the Principle, for he knew that to the unbeliever, such talk sounds like ravings °f a person obsessed. My father spoke of his love and devotion to Poster, his mother and his sisters even now. He expressed a wish to be closer to them. He reminded the son that they had been sealed for eternity and that the covenant could not be broken without just cause. He had been just. He loved them all devotedly. In his heart and in heaven, they still belonged to him. Foster didn't reply. My father wrote another letter, this one to Karen. She wrote back bitterly, in the guise of her own guardian angel, accusing him of desertion, infidelity, egotism, even theft. To her, the Principle was no more than an excuse |