Sitting at the doctor’s office, I was flipping through last year’s Sports Illustrated’s Year in Review issue. As I browsed the “Notable Deaths” section, two particular obituaries caught my eye:

Skip Prosser, head basketball coach at Wake Forest, was in good health when, after jogging, he returned to his office and suffered a heart attack. He was 56.

Dennis Johnson, a former Boston Celtics great, had just finished coaching practice for the Austin Toros when he collapsed and died on the gym floor. He was 52.

While I’d watched Prosser’s team beat my Texas Longhorns, and Johnson help deny my Houston Rockets the championship in 1986, I noticed these two deaths for a different reason:

Both men were younger than my parents.

For me, death has always been a far-off, down-the-road concern for people who couldn’t beat The Sopranos' Uncle Junior in a foot race. But, seeing that magazine made me realize I’m now at the age when it’s not uncommon to lose your parents. Add it to the list of “New Worries for Your 30s,” along with yearly physicals and Hair Club for Men.

This is not an uncommon fear, considering the important roles filled by a mother and father. “Like sandbags along the Mississippi, our parents are bulwarks against mortality, against our world falling apart,” says Thomas Cole, PhD, director of the John P. McGovern Center for Health, Humanities, and the Human Spirit at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. “As long as they are there, as long as they are stable, we feel secure.”

Now, my parents are anything but old. My mom looks the same as she did at 30, minus the perm, and my dad resembles a more athletic, better looking Larry David with more hair. But during the last couple of years, both of my parents have been diagnosed with cancer. My mother came through it beautifully, and my father is expected to do the same. Still, for the first time, they appear fallible.

I’m not used to that because they’ve always been like super heroes to me, each with their own powers to protect and serve.

My dad is one of the smartest people I know, building his own business from a typewriter and card table. The man knows how to do EVERYTHING. Because I missed out on that gene, we recently got together so he could pass on his wisdom, my own private seminar of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Adulthood.” Sitting at the foot of the master, I learned the best way to get a loan, how to buy a house, and (this is important) that it’s okay if you can’t change a tire as long as you have AAA.

And, while I can always count on him, he doesn’t really like to venture into the deep waters of emotions and spirituality. Luckily, my mom does. She’s a therapist who is busy healing the world one person at a time. We talk for hours about the meaning of life, and she provides the essential “woman’s perspective” on dating, boosting my confidence with her amazement whenever a girl doesn’t instantly fall in love with me.

But beyond their guidance, they’re two titanic pieces of the foundation on which my life is based, a source of support that keeps me upright. They are my reference point, my North Star. I know that up is up and down is down because they’re here. Things make sense, and without them, my orientation would be more shook up than when I learned dogs couldn’t talk like Scooby Doo.

Maybe my focus should be on the 30 good years – and counting – I’ve had with them. Not everyone is so fortunate to get that much time. Or, maybe I can use this awareness as a wake-up call that I’m not going to be here forever either. Confronting your own mortality can be terrifying, but as Cole explains, it can also help you figure out the purpose of your time here on earth.

“When that fear crops up – and it’s there for all of us – it raises questions like, ‘Why am I here? To raise my children? To save the planet?’ You start to see the significance of your life in terms that transcend it. You hook the meaning of your life to something bigger than yourself, to a higher being, a higher calling, to nature, to your work, in a way that provides a larger context against which to measure yourself.”

Still, I don’t know how I would relate to a world where my parents... aren’t. I’m worried I’d end up like Seinfeld’s Kramer when he was modeling for Calvin Klein: squirming on the ground in my underwear.

Yet, I do realize they are forever in me and my brother; we are their lasting legacies. I hear my mother in my laugh, my father in my voice. And in my face, let’s just say that thankfully, my mom picked up where my dad’s hooked nose could’ve been.

More importantly, I feel their courage, and I know their strength can help me face my own uncertain future. Their hearts are my heart, and they’ll always be with me.

(Even if eventually it’s from some distant point above, just to the right of the North Star.)

 

 

Last Updated: 11-26-2008

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