It's Whether You Get Up
This Vince Lombardi quote has been on the boy's bedroom door for over ten years now. I hung a poster of it at the foot of my dad's bed when he was fighting cancer.
He lost that fight more than 7 years ago now, but before he did, he got up many times.
If I have anyone to credit in my life for what some people call "stubbornness" and I call "tenacity," it's probably my dad.
He was a tenacious fighter, indeed.
When he was 13, he broke his neck in a diving accident. You read that correctly. He broke his neck.
He was in full-body traction for six months. They would come and flip him every two hours and he would stare at the ceiling or the floor. For six months. He was a child.
The doctors discussed his prognosis like he wasn't even in the room, telling my grandparents that he would never walk again. When I asked him, "What did you think when you heard him say that dad?"
Bear in mind this is a 13-year-old kid in the 50s. He replied, "I thought 'Bullshit', I'm going to walk again."
And he did. He was in chronic pain every single day of his life after that.
But he got up. He did way more than walk. He was an avid sportsman for years. He hunted, fished, participated in trap shooting and all sorts of tournaments. When I was a very young child he even bowled and played golf.
Playing baseball one time in the back yard with my brother, Brady, I once saw him run the bases, and to this day I both laugh and cry when I think about it.
Many years later, he was loading an ATV onto his truck when the tailgate failed and it fell on him, breaking 7 ribs.
He got up after that one too.
Throughout all of it, he resisted prescriptions of heavy pain medications because he knew later in life, he might really need them, after all that his body had been through. He survived chronic, sometimes excruciating pain, on over-the-counter pain relief. For decades.
It was a good thing he did, because when the cancer came, it came hard, and it was wickedly painful. The drugs he avoided all of his life, were suddenly necessary for him to survive, and thankfully they worked for him for the last 2 years of his life.
He made the best of every day he had. Once, when we were out on his little fishing boat at sunset many years ago, I caught him smiling and said, "You look happy."
He replied, "I'm better than happy."
Puzzled, I asked, "What's better than happy?"
"Content," he said.
When people ask me about "cottage progress" and "how are things going?' and "when will it be done??!" and "how much will it cost?!" they sometimes seem surprised when I'm not overly stressed about the number of delays and detours and issues that have come up.
Big deal.
I grew up in the shadow of a giant, who was also my dad, and the person who taught me everything I know about "getting up." His bar for surviving adversity and pain was sky high. There was no way that wasn't going to influence me and my brothers.
They're "Get Uppers" too.
Don't get me wrong. I know we are taught now that we should not ignore our own suffering and struggles "because someone else had it worse." I get that, but for me, this isn't about diminishing my own difficulties because my dad survived much harder ones.
My dad found contentment in a life that served him a disabling pain sandwich.
For me, it's about using his example to inspire, comfort me and push me forward.
It has been a way of coping with the inevitable agonies that have come to me in the form of injury, illness, loss, tragedy, betrayal and/or death. It's knowing that life is definitely going to knock me on my can. Over and over again. Sometimes it's really going to hurt, too, and there is really nothing I can do to about it.
Except get back up.
I will survive my cottage project difficulties just fine. I'm starting a new business. This is not a tragedy. It's a challenge, and one that I feel blessed and fortunate to have.
I will survive with contentment, and I will do it in honor of the man who taught me how.
I will do it like he did. Until I just can't anymore.
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