Dear Jim/Dad/Papa,
I’m remembering today how you came into my life when I was 5. So funny that you’d been my father’s cardiology attending in medical school, only to begin dating my mom a few years after my parents divorced.
My earliest memory of us together is riding in the back of your white Fiat convertible with an 8-track tape belting the soundtrack from Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, forever instilling in me a lifelong love of musical theater.
When I was eight years old, you took me to see La Traviata, the first and only time I’ve been to an opera. We got all dressed up and painted the town. I think I fell asleep, but I know I thought it was special.
Even though you worked a lot, you were always picking up new hobbies, learning something new, working on a project, not to impress others, but to enlighten and inspire yourself. Like your own father, a skilled craftsman, you got into woodworking when Mom was pregnant with Ryan, and built him a changing table and highchair. You later built a train table for my boys. We still have the wooden table lamp you built in wood shop in high school. It’s sitting on top of the upright piano and still works.
Professionally, you were an exceptional doctor. As a doctor myself, I feel like I am an unbiased judge now that I’ve seen all sorts of physicians of variable character and moral compasses. Even though you excelled in academic medicine, you left to join a private practice cardiology group in Wisconsin in hopes that it would allow you more time at home. I don’t remember you being home a lot during my middle and high school years, largely because both of us were so involved in our own self-development. Now that I’ve lived the doctor life firsthand, I know why you were gone so much. The private practice you helped build went on to become the best place to go in the region. The way your patients felt about you was made apparent especially at Christmas you’d bring home chocolates and wine from all the families that loved you so much. As an adult, I can see how it was your slow, clear, curious, compassionate confidence that instilled courage in others. I even watched you save the life of two people right in front of me by performing CPR, first on 2-year old Ryan when he almost drowned in our backyard pool, and again on one of my high school classmates whose heart stopped beating while playing basketball during an away tournament. You never seemed fazed by these heroic acts. It was just the right thing to do.
Even though I didn’t see it then, I see now that when I was in trouble, I really benefited from your presence and sensibility. Surely you recall the week before I went off to college when I totaled Mom’s sporty stick-shift Cadillac Cimarron after midnight driving home from a movie with my dear friend, Amy. I had to use a payphone at Menard’s parking lot to call home in tears. I was so grateful it was you who answered:
“Hello.
OK.
Are you hurt?
OK.
Where are you?
OK.”
All those nights on call had mastered a matter-of-fact calmness. You came and picked us up, and we all just got on with it. No drama.
I didn’t know it then but now I see that you embodied the principal “everything is figureoutable.“ You didn’t focus on the problem, only on the solution. You didn’t make me feel bad when I or anyone else made a mistake- just moved on to the next step of, Well, what are we gonna do now? You led with a presence that let others know that they may not know how to do it now, but they’ll figure it out. No big deal.
It wasn’t until you were hospitalized for 2 months last year that I learned you were also a phenomenal athlete. I hadn’t known you’d been a track star in high school, a runner, before you got a stress fracture in your foot. You couldn’t sit still long enough to wait for it to heal so you tried playing golf, were gifted at it, then never got back to track. When you had to decide between going to medical school or becoming a golf pro, your advisor said, “Go into medicine. You’ll still be able to play golf,” which turned out to be true.
It’s funny for me to think of you as someone who couldn’t sit still for long because you never seemed to be in the slightest bit of a hurry. I remember when you were teaching me to drive, you’d slow down at green lights as you passed through the intersection and it drove me crazy.
Remember in The Sound of Music when Captain Von Trapp returns from business in Vienna, enters his house and hears the children singing? He says to Maria, “Thank you for bringing music back into the house. I had forgotten.” I think that’s probably what you were feeling when Ryan started golfing at age 8. Ryan brought golf back into the house, and it became a reason to leave work at 4p when previously, it seemed like the sick people at work needed you more than the people at home. As someone who also made a huge transition in my life in my late 40s, I empathize with the starkness of the realization when the all-consuming identity of “physician” stops being enough to sustain you. I’m so glad you acted on behalf of your own well-being and the relationship you had with your son at that critical time.
You also trained for and competed in the Birkebeiner, a 35-mile cross country ski race in northern Wisconsin. Tom and I tried cross country skiing a few years ago, and it is REALLY HARD. It requires so much physical exertion, an incredible athletic endeavor. I can still see you practicing at home on a machine before or after work, when daylight was a scarcity. At 54, I’m now even more amazed you were able to do that type of physical exercise when you were in your 50s. Damn!
Personally, I don’t know who I’d be if it weren’t for you. I want people to know how special you were and what you meant to me. As my stepfather, you didn’t have to do anything for me. You were under no obligation or legal commitment, yet you took me in as one of your own and never wavered. You paid for my college and medical school. You came to my college for Parent’s Weekend, buying me a Rusty Nail at the bar knowing that it would taste so awful, it was unlikely to become a habit. You stayed with my son when I was in the hospital delivering my second baby. Even after you and Mom divorced 24 years ago, you made my family a priority, and gave my kids a grandparent they could reference in their minds when making hard decisions: What would Papa do?
A lifelong Iowa Republican, you stuck with your character and values and voted for Obama in 2008 and later Democratic nominees because you felt the Lincoln Republicans were no longer in representation. You provided structure, stability, reliability, accountability, and countless examples of how to treat people with dignity, show up with integrity, believe in others, give people second and third chances, acknowledge that multiple realities exist at once, know that it’s more important to love than to be right, to stay curious, to not get stuck but rather look to what’s next, and be a pinnacle of trustworthiness. With you, character mattered most.
You weren’t perfect. Perfection was never the goal. You weren’t perfect. Perfection was never the goal. When I recently read Die with Zero by Bill Perkins, I thought a lot about the concept of life energy. On the bottom of page 155, Bill Perkins says: “…your overarching goal is to maximize your lifetime fulfillment- to convert your life energy to as many experience points as you can.” Prioritizing net fulfillment over net worth. You did that.
To be clear, I wasn’t always easy to love. But you chose to do so anyway.
It’s been a year today since we lost you from this Earth, and I endeavor to honor your example every day in all that I do.
I love you, Papa. Thank you for supporting me and choosing to love me.
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