Pushing Dad

This is me and my Dad last week. Sue looked at the two of us and felt she had to take the picture. We were on a two week trip to the UK to see friends and family. Inevitably we spent a couple of days with Dad in Lincoln. He doesn't like going out much these days, but this time he jumped at my suggestion of going for a drive. He decided he wanted to go to a little seaside resort on the Lincolnshire coast. It was a place he had lived for a few years not long after he retired where he used to fish from the beach almost every day, listening to the roar of the North Sea crashing onto the shingle. He has always loved the sea.

Looking at the picture now it encapsulates for me an ironic reversal of roles: when I was young my Dad would drag me out of bed to go for a run with him. I was fat and unfit and I hated those runs, my Dad charging ahead, exhorting me to keep going and not to be "a quitter."

Dad has always relied a great deal on physical fitness to feel good about himself. So the last few years during which he has had a stroke and lost mobility have been especially hard for him. But, his physical decline has given me a spur to become fitter and stronger. When I started running a couple of years ago I found to my surprise that I actually enjoyed it and that what I had hated on those cold Winter mornings all those years ago, was not the running, but his exhortations. I was never "a quitter" in the sense that he used it, because it was his ambition that I should run with him in the mornings not mine.

And so now I push my Dad as once he pushed me. And as I push I try to accommodate these thoughts with other more generous ones of love and compassion for an old man shuffling towards his final finishing line as best he can. Sometimes I tell him to try to lose weight and to get some more exercise, but mostly I keep my mouth shut, knowing that the desire to do these things has to come from inside. I guess the time for exhortations is over and the time for "acceptance" has come. Or should that be "resignation"?