Three years ago today I visited my father in the hospital for the last time. He’d lived with the effects of a profound stroke for more than 15 years. My mother died in 2005 and that left me in charge of all his affairs, his health and ultimately, the end of his life.
He’d tumbled out of his wheelchair trying to do something he shouldn’t a few weeks before. My brothers had been out visiting and we were touring the Art Institute of Chicago together when a hospital representative reached me by cell phone. They wanted answers to a whole series of medical questions that seemed pretty deep for a basic medical checkup or even a short-term emergency visit. My dad was often taken to the emergency room by his caregiver or by ambulance over the years. I was used to getting those kinds of calls.
Broken hip
So this was different, and I finally asked what was going on. “Your father’s got a broken hip,” the woman told me. “We’re weighing whether he’s fit enough to handle surgery.”
When an elderly person breaks their hip, it’s never good news. Many times it’s the first in a series of debilitating health occurrence that lead to death. Sometimes it’s the surgery itself that is too stressful. Or the anesthesia and other effects lead to pneumonia. It just isn’t good news when old folks break their hip.
They were considering doing the surgery on him that day. But I was the official Power of Attorney for Health Care and no one had yet consulted me on those plans. I realized my father may have given some indication of his wishes, and certainly, I’d respect that. But I still needed to know more about the prospects for his health.
First things first
We weren’t able to zip straight out of the city that minute. We had to catch a train, for one thing. But ultimately I showed up at the hospital and by then, things had settled down a bit. The health professionals were running tests, including blood levels given his daily use of a blood thinner. I’d gone through the entire list of his medications over the phone earlier that day. It was a lengthy catalog. Stroke meds. Anti-seizure drugs. Anti-depressants. Blood thinners. On and on.
So my father was resting comfortably as possible once I got back out to the hospital to visit. We talked about the operation and he was firm about doing it. The doctors even told him about the long rehabilitation he was likely to need on the back end of surgery.
My father was a tough and determined man. His upbringing had been difficult given the loss of his mother to the effects of cancer treatment during the height of the Depression. He went to live with two spinster aunts and a tough old uncle. And from there, his life story unfolded in winding fashion.
And here he was, lying in bed with tubes sticking out his arms as I’d seen it so many times before. I was there for his multiple bypass surgery in the early 2000s. Went to bring him home after the stroke wiped out half his body in 2003. And took care of the man both directly and indirectly all the way to that afternoon in October of 2015.
Not looking good
Thus I was aware of how his overall affect came into play. He was weakened by the accident. They even had to put him in a sling to move him about on the bed. Things were not looking good.
But it still wasn’t my choice to tell him whether to quit all that or not. In previous years, during times of quiet conversation, my father confessed he’d be fine if he just fell asleep one night and never woke up. Living with the physical, mental and speech effects of a stroke is no bargain. Honestly, I’d arrived at the point where I’d be fine with his passing.
Moving on
Sometimes I consider myself harsh in that respect. It makes me wonder if I lack compassion somehow. Was I being selfish in letting his prospects wander off in my own mind?
He went to surgery a few days later. It was successful. But within days his health collapsed with fluid on his lungs and on October 17, 2015, my father passed away in his hospital bed.
We’d been able to keep him living in his own home all that time. Following a series of rehab attempts following his stroke, he had been moved back home with my mother for a couple years. A live-in caregiver was hired. Then another. We made it work. It was tough at times, but we made it work.
And during the years of 2005 through 2013, I served as caregiver to my late wife. We made that work too.
Keep on keeping on
Through all that I found ways to keep on keeping on. Kept on running and riding. Kept working out to keep my sanity. Kept walking in the woods to birdwatch. Found ways to keep faith in life and hope even when things seemed hopeless.
In many ways, I owe the life I have to my father. It’s not a perfect life, because I’m not perfect, and neither was he. But he made many good decisions with me over the years and these countered some of the bad things that happened along the way.
But here’s the important part, and it’s not selfish. In the end, we all owe our own lives to ourselves. Which means that when we become fathers or stepfathers or mentors to other souls who depends on us, it is good to keep in mind that it is our own commitment to living that is the best example of all.
That’s why I let my father make his own decision about the expensive hip surgery performed by the hospital. He made the choice to keep on living.
Everyday choices
In so many respects that’s the choice we all must make every day. It may not seem that dire at times, but it’s still true. And to those facing down the effects of depression or other emotional states that vex their existence, that decision is so close they can feel it in the breath they let out of their lungs.
Which is why, while running in cold weather yesterday morning, I noticed the steam being released from my lungs and mouth and said out loud, “I’m still alive.”
Because they say that the day your father or your mother dies the winds of life blow straight into your face. We no longer get to “draft” off their existence. We stand on our own making every choice on our own.
We owe all that to our fathers and mothers. But we also owe it to ourselves.
Just breathe.
I recall arriving for practice one morning when my cheeks were still flushed from having made love with my girlfriend just minutes before. Then I threw on my running shorts, trotted down the hill from the dorm and showed up for practice right on time. On my arrival, one of the freshman on our team pointed to my complexion and exclaimed, “You just had sex!”
Then for some reason, perhaps to compensate for his inability to play the game well, he felt the need to brag that he’d recently been invited to “be in the movies.” He’d been approached on the streets of Philadelphia, he told us. So we asked him all kinds of questions about the film in which he was supposedly going to appear and as the details emerged, it became evident that the type of film in which he was invited to participate was indeed a porn film.
There was also a famous porn star named Seka scheduled to make an appearance during the evening. That was supposedly the big draw that was going to set the mood for this wild party about to happen.
Despite these past experiences, my reputation as a relatively staid and moral guy was intact by the time I’d entered the work world. In fact I’d earned the nickname The Professor at the marketing agency where I worked simply by accurately spelling the word “pterodactyl” for one of the salespeople who wanted to put one of the flying dinosaurs on a marketing piece.
To create a bachelor party gift for a running buddy that was getting married, I once made a mashup of the movie Pee Wee’s Big Adventure with the porn classic 
Perhaps the most difficult example of “you’re not good enough” is going through a divorce. I know many people that have gone through that experience and with rare exception, it is a bitter passage. The best outcome is perhaps the ability to remain friends through it all upon realizing that you just weren’t meant for each other in the first place. People make mistakes in relationships and everything else in life.
So it takes a considerable boost to the constitution of self to get going again when things in life slow you down or stop you cold.
The lesson here is that the real problem lies not with those who try, or fail. It rests instead with people that have the gall to suggest someone else is not “good enough” in some way. It’s such a common thing that we sometimes take it for granted.
It’s the dismissive brand of “you’re not good enough” that deserves resistance. We experience that brand of cynicism at its earliest stages when grade school friendship and jealousies enter the picture. It’s a sad thing to realize those petty jealousies can turn into political divisions, racism, classism or sexism as a product of childishly tribal instincts.
Instead, they conducted themselves in a specious manner by conducting a hearing that was more a show force. The Senate Judiciary committee was essentially eleven men with their minds already made up against one woman with the courage to stand her ground. The committee even hid behind a “hired gun” female who was doing the dirty work of asking the question. Thus we learned how the “system” really works when it is confronted by a threat to its power. It runs and hides like a bunch of little boys who broke something valuable and don’t want to admit it.
Kavanaugh’s principal (not exactly principled) defense was that his character was being assassinated by the nature of the accusations. But that deflection still didn’t legitimately answer the question: “Did you attempt to rape her? Have you lied about it?”
Gut check time
Here comes Halloween, the night when thoughts of death and hauntings swirl around the minds of millions of people. As a Hallmark Holiday, it may not be taken all that seriously. But as a seasonal celebration with pagan and religious origins it owes its history to All Hallow’s Eve, the annual time to remember the dead.
Mortal risks
So that’s that. No more pissing around on my part. I’m going to follow my doctor’s orders going forward. Because this past spring, a longtime friend who is also a running coach suffered a scary heart attack out of the blue. He’s been running for fifty years. Didn’t help.
Which is why that moment climbing out of the pool this morning felt so immediate. I knew what I’d do if it were the last workout of my life.
Suffer in joy
Having come off a speedy team performance in a quadrangular meet against Augustana College, University of Northern Iowa and the University of Iowa, in which we lost only to UNI, our squad was fired up going into our own Luther College invitational. Our top runner had just won two races in a row, and there was a good chance he’d also take the solo victory at the Luther Invitational.
Cross country is always a sport of adaptations I’d purchased some Etonic Streetfighter training flats before leaving home for school, and those shoes were proving to be a mistake doing all the high mileage. They were too wide and too flat, and the rubber felt hard. Plus they blistered me. It was time to dump them. 
We’d all tried to make our shoes last longer by placing layers of athletic tape on the outside edge of the heel to keep it from wearing away. That was actually a quite genius and practical solution. It would prevent the uneven wear from one side to the other if one had a longer leg. It also kept the shoes from wearing down so badly on the heel before one got the full value from the rest of our shoes. We’d sometime get 500-600 miles out of a single pair that way. Then again, that only meant 5-6 weeks of wear. Then it was time for a new pair.
There comes a time in every athlete’s life when it does no further good to offer up excuses why things aren’t happening like they should. When I started swimming three or four years ago, I could barely manage a couple laps in a 25 yard pool before grasping the side and waiting for my breath to return.
Saturday morning we rode into a stiff west wind following early morning rainstorms. The roads were so wet the rooster-tails of the rider ahead of you made it difficult to see as rainwater coated the lens of our sunglasses.
The geese in Illinois, like so many other states in this country, don’t even migrate any more. They have everything they need to survive cold winters, especially neatly mowed golf courses and corporate campus lawns. In many ways we’ve genetically engineered a perfect goose environment.
Those of us who ride between the cornstalks all summer come to think of those fields as our own. We suffer in the heat blowing off the fields. We sweat and whirr between the corn walls and let those images burn into our minds. We become children of the corn.
This September we let one of those stalks grow in the back yard next to a sunflower that also propagated from a single seed cast off from the bird feeder.
Now that the corn and bean fields are being harvested there is little to occupy the fields but the horned larks, Lapland longspurs and snow buntings descend from the north and stay in the cold and snowy fields all winter. They feed on weed seeds and roadside pickings, a truly cold comfort lifestyle for survival. But they do survive and return each year.
At the mere age of twenty-one I was diagnosed with a retinal detachment in the back of my left eye. The small-town optometrist in Decorah, Iowa sent me to the Gunderson Clinic in LaCrosse, Wisconsin where they hooked me up to a machine the size of a Volkswagen and shot laser beams into my eye to coterize the hole in the retina. It worked, and I never had to have the intrusive surgery where people wind up out of action for weeks. So I tend to trust what doctors and dentists and opthamologists and the like have to say.
I answered my doctor honestly that to this point in my life, there’s not a problem in that department. Erectile dysfunction, as they call it, has not caught up with me. And by the way, that’s not my junk in the illustration above. But according to slide C it looks like someone could be a Leftie. 
Because it’s not the Democrats against whom the judge in question should be raving. It’s the proven and litigated behavior of sexual harassers such as Fox News’ Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly that are to blame for the suspicions from the public about power hungry men and boys behaving badly.
Back on campus after the Resident’s Assistant retreat in the hills of Wisconsin, it was time to set up our dorm room. Having a much larger room was one of the perks of being an RA, yet my roommate, also a runner on the cross country team, decided we should each built privacy lofts in the event that we needed them given our pending girlfriend situations.
The entire team was geared up that fall. The music we were sharing reflected the energy within the group. The Cars had just come out with their first album, an intense collection of songs (My Best Friend’s Girl, Let the Good Times Roll, and more) and we’d blast out the dorm room windows and even played them loud on a set of oversized speakers that we set up near the starting line of our own invitational that fall. We were all in.
A few days before heading back to college, I’d holed up in my bedroom with my own stereo system. I was trying to determine what it meant to be entering my senior year in college. So I worked through a number of albums and closed with the entire ELO double disk that concluded with the anthemic Mr. Blue Sky.
