Strength

For those who do not get the Facebook updates, last Sunday, my father started having seizures at the breakfast table. An ambulance took him to hospital where it was determined there was no saving him. Hospice has set us up with everything we need to care for him at home. He's now been without food and water for a week and is sleeping all the time. I've written this sitting at his bedside.

Often people who are submissive are looked at in our society as being week. They often seem to have no opinion when it comes to decision making. But as I sit watching my father die, I look up to the pictures above his bed of my very domineering mother that controlled his life for fifty eight years, I realize just how strong of a man he was. The strength it took to live with such a woman for so long is immeasurable. To choose to let her have her way whether it's what he wanted or not and to always put the welfare of his family before his own desires took more strength than I can imagine. My father has proven this week just how strong he is by hanging on to life when his body has failed. He keeps hanging on.

One thing that is certain despite any beliefs of afterlife or not is that he will live on. Pieces of his strength and determination will live on for many years in each of the people in his life that he has touched.

In 1954, he took his new bride and son to Iowa to study Chiropractic care. After becoming a doctor, moved again to Louisiana to start a practice in a town that had never heard of this new type of health care.

After a couple of failed attempts to get a profitable practice going with an ever expanding family, he made the difficult decision to move to Michigan and join the ranks of men making good money working for Henry Ford building automobiles to move the world in a new direction.

He never gave up on his dream to help people naturally and all the line-men at Ford referred to him as Doc. With an adjusting table in our dinning room, there was always a steady stream of patients coming through our door.

He is a man that has always taught us to reduce, reuse and recycle even before people knew those words. He would recycle the foil off a Hershey's Kiss. He would pick up garbage off the street out of respect for the neighborhood and the people who live there. He taught me to get up and go to work regardless of how I felt simply because others are counting on me to be there.

These are all things that will stick with me for life. Simple ways that will help my father's life to never end even after his body is gone.

He was a pioneer in Chiropractic care and a dedicated man. Even now as he holds on to my sister's hand he's teaching us to be strong and never give up.