It is funny how one thinks of heroes.
As a young person, one often looks up to someone who can do something they cannot like an older sibling being able to ride a bike. It could be of a famous athlete in a favourite sport. How impressive it is to see these amazing accomplishments. But the way one chooses a hero seems to change with time.
I deal with young teenagers. I have spent a few decades asking them to choose and describe their hero. It surprised me when the heroes they described were their parents. It also surprised me when they would explain that their parents were heroes because of what they would do for them. It felt a little self-centered to my old ears. I didn’t quite understand the reasoning.
Since I am so much older and wiser than my students, let me share who one of my heroes is: my dad. I choose my dad because of what he did for me.
This is not only true about my dad, but also about my husband, my godmother, my uncles… I guess Dad is in the center of it because he was the first one whom I particularly noticed.
You see, there are amazing people in my life who had to accept a shift that life, health or circumstances threw their way. Actually, they didn’t HAVE TO accept it, they CHOSE to accept it. They also did it with grace (after some incidents of kicking and screaming).
Maybe I am looking at Dad now because I am noticing how much I am like him… the jowls, the eyes, the pig-headedness, the self-sufficient person, the guy who would drive across a couple of provinces to help out one of their kids…
Let me give you an idea who the guy was. Dad is the guy who drove himself to the hospital, bleeding from the head. On another occasion, he was also the guy who asked me to pick up his car from where he had parked near the hospital when he drove himself while checking his erratic pulse on the day he had the first of a series of heart attacks.
To say he was self-sufficient might be a little bit of an understatement.
I, too, try to be self-sufficient. It is but one of my many flaws.
I have often wondered: How did he go from the guy who drives himself to emergency to hiring handymen to do work he had always prided himself in doing? How did he accept the shift? Why didn’t he complain about it in front of me?
I remember thinking how proud of him I was to see the shift in him.
I remember feeling he was somehow showing me the way it could be done.
He wasn’t the first one to show me the way. He wasn’t the last one either but the time I worked in his house after his passing gave me the time to reflect on his last years and take notice.
I have wondered over the years since he has passed how he felt during that time.
How did he grow up enough to know that he was not diminished as a person because he gave business to a couple of handymen?
How did he manage to let go of that part of his identity with grace? I don’t know the answer and, since losing him, I probably never will.
What I do take from it, is the strength it took for him to accept the shift his life took.
Will I prove to be grown-up and strong enough to learn to turn to others?
Time will tell.
Thanks for the lesson Dad.