Father's Day: The True Nature of Courage
My father as a young man My father should have died when I was two, but he didn’t. He died when I was thirty-five instead. Thirty-three years of living a life that cancer should have compromised to such an extent that for many people it may not have been worth living. And yet, every day that he woke up, he woke to work and loved his work, and though he seldom sang, his whole body sang with joy; he laughed, he joked around, he was a happy man. The more crippled his body became, the more his soul shone through. In fact, it was only when I sat there next to his hospital bed when his final bout with cancer finally took his life away, that I first saw the X-rays of his body, taken years before, and which finally mapped out to me how singularly twisted and sinister a disease had taken hold of him. Sketched in white against the dark, I saw the bird bones of my father’s frame, twisted out of almost all recognition, deformed, alternatively thinned and knobbly, devastated by the cancer