Confronting Hobson's Choice

On January 7th, my father was admitted at 0600 to the Ottawa Civic Hospital. Before noon, the surgeons had removed the right leg below the knee and stitched him up. This was done under and epidural because of his assessed high risk under a general (stroke risk, poor heart, bad lung, infection, etc.). The surgery went, according to the vascular surgeon, well. Nonetheless, Robert had one less foot and lower leg by mid-day.

This truly was a Hobson's Choice - antibiotics being ineffective, infection growing, with the possibility of necrosis not that remote, versus a surgical risk, the challenges of learning to walk with a prosthetic, the risk of stroke, and the challenges of healing at 78. Not the sort of choice anyone has to make.

I found myself unable to make a recommendation as both choices seemed perilous and uncertain. My father faced the choice with a certain sans peur sang froid. His calculus was that chronic wracking pain made life not worth living and this offered some remote hope of surcease and some quality of life, however challenging, in the future.

Father is home now and we're into dealing with the day-to-day impacts and trying to get him well and the pain controlled and the house fully adjusted to his needs. That's a big challenge, but I'm hoping we have some luck because he was brave enough to face the surgery and lucky enough to get throgh it unscathed (well, down a lower leg and foot, but that was the plan after all). If we can get his pain moderated, the sutures healed, I think he may well walk again on a prosthesis. He's a tough old bird and so is my Mom who is his support and who enables him to carry on.

He is human enough to have been worn down by the chronic pain, to have fear of this operation and losing his leg, but that was only a few moments and passed. He faced the whole process with an aplomb and courage that I honestly would be hard pressed to match.

At times like these, your mind tends to look for mechanisms to deal with the worry, the stress, the fatigue, and the possibilities. Mine took me down the line of thinking of what I might say at a eulogy for my Father. Grim stuff, but when you can't sleep, sometimes your mind makes up its own course rather than heeding your direction.

I may yet write out that eulogy, both as a preparation and perhaps to let my Father see what I would have said.

My father is no saint; He has flaws and shortcomings and views with which I vehemently disagree in some particulars. Yet, at the same time, he is the man who defined for me the words Integrity, Diligence, and Honour. (In my teens and early twenties, I might have added Intransigence, Provincial Mindset, and Rigidity, but I'm older now and think that assessment at least a significant exaggeration).

My mother has lives her values: Honour, Professionalism, Personal Responsibility, and Compassion. From her, I learned to care about people and to be willing to work hard and do a creditable job of whatever task I attempt. I learned and integrated the credo of personal responsibility. And I learned about Honour over Opportunity and Doing The Right Thing.

But from my Father, I learned about Integrity and Honour in an even deeper sense. By example, he demonstrated that the corruption prevalent in parts of our society, although too large to defeat, can be opposed. His actions showed that because others abuse a trust, even a public trust, to their own benefit, that does not justify you doing the same.

Personal Gain is nowhere near as important as personal ethics and the value of your Word and your Commitment. I often wonder how he resisted the opportunities to become corrupt and profit when it was so easy and systemic, but that is part of the core of his personality.

He sets a high bar of expectation from those with whom he deals (and that included me, to be honest). He expects them to do what they say and follow the terms of an agreement. But he will not cheat someone, even if it were an option and they were naive. His sense of Fairness and Rightness extend to dealing equitably with others as long as they too will do the same.

I've loved my Father and Mother for all of my life; Love is the natural state of a child for the parents. As I have aged, I have cultivated a more balanced, warts-and-all perspective on both of them as people. In doing so, I have come to greatly respect each of them for the things they have done, the stands they have taken, and for the way they have carried themselves in situations where it would have been far easier to do the wrong sort of thing, the easy and possibly profitable thing. But they did not.

And thus, in addition to my Love, they have earned my lasting Respect. And above and beyond that, they have become my Friends. I am very fortunate to have both around and to benefit from their advice (even Mother's reminders 'it's cold outside, better put on some mitts!' and the like). I'm also incredibly fortunate to have had two such exemplary role models to measure my own character against.

I may have inherited Stubborn, Intransigent, Independence from both sides of the family, along with the "Gift of the Gab". But along with that, I inherited a firm sense of Integrity, Duty, Responsibility, and Compassion.

I'm no angel either, as my parents before me, but whatever I am, I owe to them. And I'm very, very glad to still have both, in whatever decrepit form, around to share their wisdom with me.

My cup runneth over with blessings and I try hard to remind myself of this while tossed too fro on the Sea of Troubles. Most people will never have such good fortune at any point in their lives.

Have a good weekend. Hug the people who matter to you - never take them for granted. our spans are finite and our duration unpreditable.