Yesterday would have been my father's 90th birthday, if he were still alive. But he's dead and gone. He died in 1989 from emphysema that got complicated by pneumonia. Those two together give you a few days on a respirator and then you're out.
I try not to think that I killed my father, but the truth is, he got the pneumonia while cleaning the swimming pool for me, so that I could have an end-of-summer party. I'll always feel guilty about that. I didn't get him addicted to the smoking - that happened during World War II, when he was stationed with the Army Air Corps in Guam. Then the damage was done over 35 more years of four packs a day, and he eventually quit smoking when I was 8 because the doctor told him otherwise he wouldn't see me graduate from high school. So I suppose I could look at it that I actually gave him a few extra years to live. But barely. He did see me graduate from high school and then a month later - well, that was when he got the pneumonia.
So I grew up in a house where breathing was a privilege, something for the young and healthy, and not to be wasted frivolously. Everything we did as a family was modified to make sure my dad could participate. That meant as little walking as possible. My mother - the exercise hater - gladly complied. Me? I resented everything back then, so it's hard to tease out now what part of me objected to the imposed limitations on exertion and what part was just generally disagreeable.
Life comes in parts. I learned that before most kids did because I knew growing up that my dad had had another life before us. He'd been married in the 1940s and 50s to someone other than my mother. They'd lived intellectually illuminated lives, surrounded by smoke and appetizers. They were good looking, had lots of parties, and they'd hung meaningful art on the walls. Two brilliant daughters eventually came around, my half sisters Beth and Ellen. All that living and breathing... It was fiery! One day then it all broke up in a mess and nobody was the same after. Especially my dad.
The next part of my dad's life wasn't fiery. There aren't any photos of him from that time. No friends that lasted. It seems even his family played a recessed role. What do you say to a once active man - who'd played tennis and baseball and ran - but increasingly couldn't breathe? He lived in Manhattan, someplace off of Park Ave, nothing posh, but not the Upper West Side either, on 81st Street and CPW, where he'd first lived with wife #1 before they did what people did and hightailed it up to suburbs. I'm sure he socialized, charmed the ladies in the secretary pool, and passed the time... but it was a lonely decade. Not his best part.
Finally, the last part came when my dad met my mother. She was sparkly and fun and changed everything. People say my mother knew when she married my dad that his emphysema gave him an expiration date, but she married him in spite of it, because of love. I'm not so sure of that. When you're fantasy prone like my mother is, sometimes you don't see that life is in parts; you perceive it all as one long dream sequence with the characters staying constant throughout. My mother still talks about her parents as if they were around today, though they've been dead for nearly 50 years. And as a child I'm sure she talked about her fantasy prince, as if he were already with her then. My dad just dropped in to play the role in 1968, but he was there before, and he's still there now, in her mind.
When you live your life in a dream state, you get a lot of circular references. Children are born and become like parents. Each house is a downsize or an upgrade of the former, filled with the same lamps and letter boxes. You do what you can to keep your surroundings looking and feeling consistent over time. Life is one long story. I think maybe I was living my life like that for a while. I can relate to the symptoms, at least. Bumbling along, holding on to characters, never getting a clean break, trying to link places and circumstances that really have no link at all.
Life's gotten a lot better since I started living it in parts. I learned the pacing for "life in parts" from my father, as I watched him suffocate during his last one, and compared that in my mind to what I knew of him when he'd been able to live under different constraints. Forever I'd been neglecting my own constraints... maybe trying to fix them, to live the perfect life, and have the fantasy in my mind build to an exciting climax. But as soon as I let myself notice the real constraints - not the made up ones, it all changed.
You might think that I'm going to say that the new part I'm in now started when I started running, or that running pushed me along to a better place. It didn't. The start of my new part really happened a year ago. Family and work stress had finally gotten to me. How could I love what I had so much, and still feel like it was killing me. I started to look at things more objectively, more strategically, and decided to take a chance and let go of some of my old attachments. My methods were very tactical. I changed my job and I started acting true to my priorities, and was vigilant about it, even when I was dying of ambivalence or fear.
In my dad's case, as his disease progressed, the tactics he utilized to move from part to part were things that inevitably made him less dependent on breathing. He made a life where his suffocation wouldn't glare up at him, and remind him of his mortality at every turn. When I met him, he was barely breathing at all. Which meant I could barely breathe at all too. Not his fault, just the nature of some families - you have to drop to the lowest common denominator if you want to remain a part of it.
When I made my decision to evolve last year, one of the things I let go of was my own shallow breathing. I'd still been living in the family of my childhood, a place sympathetic to the needs of my father's final part. Running now isn't so much a thing that defines me, as it is evidence that I'm not suffocating any more. The world around me seems at once smaller and bigger as I whiz by. Sweat flicking off my skin, lungs stretching to take in the air, spitting... There is no circular reference; and so I know I'm in my second part.
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