Friday, July 3, 2009

Reading an excerpt from Bliss Broyard’s book, One Drop, I suddenly tear up. The book is about her father, literary critic Anatole Broyard, who, on his deathbed, confessed his greatest secret: he was part black. My own father was Filipino, and reading about Anatole watching Bliss’ brother run a 5K, I suddenly felt sad, wishing he was still here with me.

In the book excerpt, Bliss says that her father once wrote, of the “critically ill, ‘it may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminished self.’ He reasoned that by developing a style for their illness, a stance that incorporated it into the ongoing narrative of their lives, sick people could ‘go on being themselves, perhaps even more so than before.’“

Is that what I am trying to do, by repeating a challenge I met five years ago? Recapture a me I used to be, that, it feels like, cancer has tried to “diminish”? Perhaps… perhaps my 40-by-40 is a kind of reincarnation, this effort, this journey I am embarking on. I am also willing to explore the idea that it may be this exact effort that heals my illness, moreso even than the drugs I’ve been given. Medicine comes in all forms.

My father was a runner. He ran every day, rain or shine, and when I was 12 and got a D in Pre-Algebra, he sat me down at the kitchen table and said, “Do you want to work at McDonald’s?” I shook my head, holding back tears (oh! the wrath of a disappointed father!). “I mean,” he said, “I don’t mind you working at McDonald’s; it’s an honest job, but at 18, you are out of my house, and it’s hard to pay the rent on minimum wage.” I told him I didn’t want to work at McDonald’s. “Okay then. Go upstairs and get your sneakers on. You’re coming running with me.” I was suddenly confused. “What?” He stood up, looking down at me. “You need some discipline, so you are coming running with me until these grades get back up.”

At 12, you are still in that vague area of adolescence where you do what your parents say. At least, that’s the way it was when I was 12. In the 80s. So I put on my sneakers, and I ran with my dad. Every day, rain or shine, until I was 16 and, of course, occupied with Drama Club and Track and various other afterschool distractions. I never ran with my father again, sadly. I Rollerbladed with him once, but his pace was much, much faster by the time I was in college, so I always ran on my own after that. Later, he took up cycling, but he died of runner’s heart, ironically, when I was 21 and about to graduate. I think now, he would have gotten into triathlons eventually (he was a swimmer in the Army), and probably surprised himself.

It’s not the present that I think we miss when we lose someone we love, but the future – the future they were supposed to be a part of. I miss my father most, not when I look at old pictures, but when I think of something I wish he could be there to see: my first solo marathon, my wedding, my first child. I’ll miss him at every one of my 40 finish lines, I know, because without him, I think, I would not even be a runner.

My favorite quote from the excerpt? “[A] person’s identity [is] an act of will and style.” I totally agree. 🙂