  A week from Thursday my father is undergoing 2 operations to fix his broken heart. He is growing weaker by the day and admitted to me tonight that the 2 minutes it takes him to shave in the morning leaves him feeling completely winded. How difficult it has been to watch him grow weak before my eyes, this man who has always been as strong as an ox, as healthy as a horse -- this man who never took a sick day in his life (or even an aspirin, for that matter). How frustrating it has been to hear him insist that he knows better than the specialists, to hear him refuse treatment, to know that he is living in the land of denial -- while his heart muscle grew weaker and weaker.
And how painful it has been to answer the phone to my mother's tearful cries, fearful she will be a widow if he keeps refusing the operations needed to restore him to health. Actually, I misspoke above. I do remember one day (and one day only) that my father called in sick to work. And it was not because he was sick. It was because he went to feed our goldfish on his way out the door one morning and discovered that my sister's goldfish had jumped out of the tank and was barely alive on the dining room carpet. Mind you, he never wanted those fish. When I was 5, my sister and I begged for goldfish. He said no. So he was less than thrilled to arrive home from work one summer day to learn that my mother went and bought 2 goldfish anyway. My sister and I quickly lost interest in those fish, but not my Dad. He came to love them and I will never forget the sad look in his eyes that morning Sunshine jumped out of the tank.
He spent the whole day nursing that fish and moving her back and forth in the water, trying to force air in her gills, but in the end he couldn't save her. But he did make sure she was was laid to rest in a proper burial under the buckeye tree my uncle Bert planted in our backyard when he was a boy.
I could write all night about the kindness of my father's heart and the gentleness of his soul -- about all of the stray animals he let us keep, about how he visited my grandfather every single day at the nursing home until his death, about how the first thing he did the moment he walked into the house from work was play with his 3 daughters -- but it is late and I need to be getting to bed.
Thank goodness after a month of my family begging and pleading and fighting with him, my father has listened to reason and has decided to go ahead with treatment. So I await August 26th with nervousness and hope. We have been told he will feel like a new man when the operations are completed. But I don't want a new man. I like the old one just fine and I am anxious to have him back. 
