Remembering Paul

Today is the first anniversary of the death of my son Paul Sebastian Joel, an extremely gifted musician whose improvisations on acoustic guitar, flute, recorder, hammered dulcimer and other instruments were always beautiful and fresh---although his main instrument, and his first love, was cello. Even though he’d lost the entire little finger of his left hand in an accident when he was thirteen (also the top phalange of the ring finger had to be reconstructed) and he continued to bow with his right hand, he became an excellent cellist, both technically and expressively.

When Paul was eighteen I visited him and his girlfriend briefly in their Chicago apartment in the winter of 1972. This was a particularly difficult time for me, my rather desperate circumstances providing a back-drop for the following scene, which I don’t remember having mentioned to anyone before.

One afternoon shortly after I arrived in Chicago I sat transfixed in Paul’s living room as he played from memory one of the movements of an unaccompanied cello suite by Johann Sebastian Bach (his mother and I chose Paul’s middle name in honor of Bach, whose music was one of the things that had brought us together). Here was this beautiful very young man with his partially mangled hand playing one of the world’s great musical compositions perfectly and gloriously, playing this masterpiece like an angel. I distinctly remember saying to myself as his performance approached the end, my mind soaring with admiration, “This is what is meant by fulfillment---now I understand what the word means.”

The above photo of Paul and me is from the summer of 2007, about 6 months before his death.