These Things I’m Telling You

The Quiet Acceptance Of What Is Forgiveness is the gift you give yourself My father was in the final stages of multiple organ failure. In short his body had begun to wear out. Mind you he gave it a decent run as he had more or less punished his body with years of alcohol abuse and injuries. Some of these injuries were self-sustained and others inflicted upon him through violent encounters in street brawls and during the Second World War. He had been shot not once but twice. The first shooting occurred during the Second World War on the famous Kakoda Trail whilst repelling the Japanese. This incident kind of makes sense given there was a world war on after all he was in a war zone, however it’s the second shooting that confuses me the most. Somehow my father got into an argument with a fellow gambler about a wager on a greyhound. To this day the exact details are not known, but the facts are clear are that someone approached him whilst he was walking along the street and shot him. The result was that he was found in the gutter, taken to hospital where the on call surgeon decided that it would be best to amputate his arm. Permission was required to perform this surgery and my mother who was the next of kin refused to sign the forms stating that he would ‘drink himself to death’, so they left the bullet in there and managed to contain any infection. Subsequently he was able to keep his arm and life went on. When I was a young boy I often asked him about the mysterious scar on his arm. He always told me with a wink that it was a shark attack, then he would have a chuckle ruffle my hair and move on. It was not till many years later when I became privy to his medical records that I knew the truth. In addition to having these remarkable events happen to him he contracted Malaria, suffered dysentery, survived beatings, drank alcohol in vast quantities, had prostate cancer and a host of other things as well. He was to all the doctors that met him a ‘medical marvel’. At one stage he was misdiagnosed with stomach cancer that turned out to be shrapnel from an explosion of some sort during the war. During his later years I was called several times to his hospital bed with the understanding that he would not survive the night. On one of these occasions I arrived and he was resting comfortably. The medical staff had him in an airbag that cocooned him; it looked like a space blanket. At the bottom of the bag they were pumping hot air into the bag to control his body temperature. It was something to do with the hypothalamus (apparently responsible for maintaining body temperature). He was wearing a white beanie on his head; I recall thinking that he looked like the rap artist Eminem. I sat and watched him and wondered what he might be thinking, where would he go when he went? As the night went on I fell asleep in the chair next to him. When I awoke I was amazed to see him staring at me, his words inquisitive as to why I was there. I informed him that according to the medical people he was supposed to pass away quietly. His response….’not yet son, when I’m ready’. My father was a complex person to say the least. He was intelligent, staunch, and a man of incredible loyalty to his friends. He spoke several languages, had travelled the world with the merchant navy, survived the Second World War, had a journalistic background and wrote a number of short stories. He had the driest sense of humor and was quick witted often keeping my friends in stitches regaling them with his yarns. The flip side; he spent a significant amount of time in prison where I visited him each week. He was prone to severe outbursts that were almost always violent and at varying times he was an alcoholic. Sadly like so many he could not manage his emotional intelligence.