This is my dad. Recently he was diagnosed with Prostate Cancer. I don't know anyone who I admire more in this world than my dad. I know that people all over the world admire and respect their parents...but I think I would look up to him even if he wasn't my dad.
I don't know exactly how to explain it...but I am humbled by him in a way that make me feel better equipped to live this life. Consider just a few examples:
My junior year of college my mother was in a head on collision with a teenager who lost control of his car while drinking and driving. She was taken to the hospital and surgery had to be done. A few months later my dad picked up a hitchhiker near the church were he works...it was this same kid. The kid did not know who my father was but went on to tell him that he had been through some rough times lately and couldn't seem to get a handle on life. My father listened and offered encouragement.
In more recent years my mother's father was dying of cancer. They took my grandfather and my dementia riddled grandmother into their home. During the last months of my grandfathers life my father bathed, toileted, catheterized and cared for him in the most gentle of ways imaginable until his death.
When I was really young and living in Newport News, Virginia we had neighbors who lived across the street from us. Their younger sons (in their late teens and early twenties) egged our house. Several months later would find my dad and I giving one of those sons who had egged our house a ride to work every morning for weeks.
Even now as he is in Florida preparing for five weeks of daily radiation treatment he is spending the next few days between tests and the start of radiation by spending time working for Habitat for Humanity.
There are countless acts of generosity, humility, selflessness, and love that have poured out from this man. Don't misunderstand...he has made mistakes as well. One day I asked him what the most memorable parenting mistake he had made was...he said that one day he had yelled at me for knocking over a can of paint in our living room. It turned out that he had actually knocked over the paint with a ladder and not realized it...turning he saw me and made assumptions (not a far off assumption to make considering my clutzy ways).
This is also the same man who taught me my love of cheating in games...our family games are always the most honest games going because everyone is constantly watching out for everyone else who might be cheating them!
A friend of mine...who may or may not be one of the last people to seek guidance from a minister of any sort has repeatedly said that my dad would be the one minister he would want to be at his deathbed to console him as he enters hell. Partially in jest, but with truth behind these words that explain just how my dad is seen by others...
I can't fathom a world without him. It pains me to consider losing him and though this cancer has been caught at the earliest stages possible and he prognosis is excellent. I am struck by a fear of lost so huge that it almost seems all consuming.
So where am I going with all of this. I don't know...
I do know...I love my father. He amazes me...and I would consider it to be the greatest honor if I can only be a quarter of the man he is today.
