Dad

I am the strongest person I have ever been…and the weakest. I can make critical decisions quickly – whether to take someone to the hospital, run for help, shuttle my son to the basement during a thunderstorm, or just stay put. An intuitive sense about what to do in difficult situations guides my actions.

I absorbed these attributes from my dad. He assesses, treats, rescues, bandages, lifts and carries everyone in his life. Dad was a paramedic when I was a little girl. If he didn’t possess those traits early on, he was a quick study after emergency medical training.

Life is not lived in the back of an ambulance, however. Crises can occur anytime, but their duration is usually temporary. Adrenalin kicks in, provides the energy boost required to react, then subsides. Or it should subside. My dad is in a constant state of adrenalin-rush. When he’s not in route from accident to ER, he’s waiting impatiently for the call.

I am the weakest person I have ever been when I can’t fix a situation, when the tools I carry are found to be useless. As I stared at my father during a hospital breakfast, pushing food around on my plate while my mother recovered from cancer surgery upstairs, a gaping hole appeared between us. Neither of us could make this better. We were helpless. All the expertise contained within medical journals and texts could not remove the cancer from my mom’s body. All of dad’s training, instinctual reactions, the need for safety and preserving health could not affect change in this situation.

As a child, it was easy for me to believe the myth and think of my dad as larger than life. His imposing height intimidates immediately. When riding on his shoulders, I felt like I could touch the stars. He was mine and I had an unerring confidence that he was in control of the world. If any evildoers had other ideas…well, dad would set them straight. He was my world. I followed where he led. He did not have to rule with an iron fist; his disappointment, if I ever witnessed such a thing, would break me into pieces.

My dad and I could have disappeared within that hole on that fateful morning. It was easy to give up, say that there was nothing we could do, turn around and walk away. Over the edge, there was only blackness. Instead, another instinct took over – a connection almost forty years in the making. Love. Love for each other. Love for my mother. Without words, we knew there was no turning back. We were in this for the long term, whatever happened, whatever we had to do to put one foot in front of the other.

Dad: the super-hero would become dad: the every-man. And that’s the moment I understood that true strength lies not within abilities or intellect; it lies within the core. Gravitational pull from the side of the abyss was no match for dad’s broad step back into reality. He’s still there today. Not driving the ambulance, but quietly holding my hand as each day unfolds.

Dad is the strongest guy I’ve ever known.