My Dad's 100th

My dad would be 100 years old today. He isn’t here to share that, but he did live to 92, which isn’t too bad.

I dreamed about him a couple of nights ago: in my dream he had become James Bond, and was working to save the world. Not as a globe-trotting spy with a license to kill, but a small-town doctor with a license to heal. While those two occupations are completely different, his sense of himself, and awareness of his place in the world, is just as immediate as 007.

I’ve always thought his sense of patience with people, his ability to listen carefully and fully, to suggest to them the direction in which they should go — never pushing, always gently encouraging — was due in no small part to the fact he contracted tuberculosis while he was in his mid-20s, and ended up confined to bed for 18 months. The sanitorium was in Howell, Michigan, not far from the hospital in Detroit where he contracted the disease from a patient he was treating in his medical residency. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to be in his mid-20s, just starting his career as a doctor, and suddenly to be trapped in a bed, with his family 500 miles away. He never talked about it with me or my brother, but I have to think that his ability to always see the wider world, and put himself (and me too, of course) into a larger context came from the kind of meditation in those physical limitations.

In that respect, I’ve always thought he was one of the most Zen-like persons I’ve ever known. Of course, he wouldn’t understand what “Zen-like” meant, as a child of the middle of America in the early part of the 20th century. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t live with that sense of awareness, of presence, of knowing your place in the wider world, what one could do - and not do.

On the day he died in 2014, a few hours before that end, he said his last words to me: “I feel very young.”

And he was, even at the end of his life. Love you, Dad.