Do you suppose we live our whole lives in reaction to our families, our parents, our brothers and sisters?
When I was eleven, my father, a professional athlete when he was younger, took me out on a baseball diamond to toughen me up. He hit a sharp line drive which hit me on the forehead and I fell to the ground. Sports had taken my father out of poverty, given him friends, social status, and eventually helped him find good and lasting work. He believed sports were essential to young kids – especially gawky and skinny immigrant kids – climbing up the ladder in America.
When I dropped the ball he screamed across the field that I was a sissy, that I should have caught the ball, and he yelled at me for a long time and began hitting other balls to me, even harder. He had been pressuring me all of my life to become an athlete, I resisted him every step of the way. I holed up in my room writing, reading books.
I dropped my glove that day and walked off of the field, and a voice in my head told me that I needed to keep my father out of my life and out of my head. I did, we never really spoke again or had much to do with one another. He never visited me in any house I lived in and never spent an hour with my daughter alone. It was not until a few days before his death nearly 80 years later that we talked to one another. At that time, we said goodbye – he was dying – and we were finally honest with one another. We each agreed that we were not the son or the father that the other really wanted or needed. It was the closest we ever came to being authentic with one another, the closest I ever came to loving him.
I tell this story because I am trying to understand why I shunned athletic activity my whole life, rejected and ignored my heart and my body, lived a life only of the mind until I learned that I was one walk away from dying. I refused exercise, any kind of athletic activity, anything like gyms or treadmills. I suppose I was living in opposition to my father, my whole life. And curiously, I was not unhealthy, I never spent a day in the hospital or was ever seriously ill.
So I am spinning in the irony of my post-surgery recovery, trying to understand why my body has come through for me now with flying colors, and in such an athletic and strong way. Why I was the first person ever to leave the ICU of my hospital just three days after open heart surgery. I surely have not been living a life of the mind this past month, I have walked 26 miles this week alone and enjoyed every minute of it, my scars have healed in record time and my recovery has moved long so swiftly that after just a few weeks, I can drive and use my camera, weeks ahead of schedule.
My body is not the hopeless mess I thought it was.
I can’t help but think of my father, and somewhere in my body, his genes have carried the day, got me up and walking in the hospital, and kept me moving every since. Maybe it was his voice in my head, telling me not to be a wuss, to get up and walk. I view my body in a completely different way now, I do not see it as something that does not work and function well, I see it as something that functions very well and is strong and healthy. I love using it, every day. For me, that is a shockingly different view of life. Hard to get my head – my precious head – around it, my smart-ass head doesn’t really have an answer.
But I am thinking more and more of my father. We did not love one another, he and I, I am sure of that, but he was trying to tell me something I could not hear, because his way of telling it was so clumsy and cruel. My body is important, taking care of it is important. My body saved my life this month, I saw many people in the hospital whose bodies could not heal them heal and recover, whose hearts were damaged so much more than mine.
I supposed we are, in some ways, condemned to live our whole lives in the shadow of our parents and our families, but it is never too late to live and learn, to grow and understand. My father, of course, was trying to love me in the only way he knew, and since I could not love him in that way, I rejected him and his view of the world. Yet he left it to me, it is his legacy to me, and in some ways, his genes saved my life, even if he could not learn how to be a father to me. I take that as love.
Was he a good man? I think so, many people loved him, he did a lot of good. I know a lot of people who can relate to everybody but the people close to them, I have, at times, been one of those people. I am my father’s son, for all my huffing and puffing.
If he were alive today, I would tell my father that I am sorry we could never work things out with each other, but I understand what he was saying about my body. I am grateful for the athleticism he somehow managed to pass on to me, it saved my life. I need to love and respect my body, it is a good body and I will honor it in the years left to me and work on keeping it fit and healthy.
I have learned the that heart, the mind and the body are not separate things, they are one thing, all parts of the whole, parts of the soul. I think my father was trying to tell me about that. I guess they call it the integration of the soul, sometimes you have to nearly die to learn how to live.
