Letter: “We Can Do This Dad!”

Just days from now my wife and I would be going somewhere in our little green bug to celebrate her birthday.

The car was a gift from our kids on the occasion of our 50^th Anniversary, a VW Beetle of nearly the same year as the year we were married, the same make and model as we drove away in a half-century before on our honeymoon.

But she’s gone now, having succumbed to cancer, and so on her birthday I’ll travel to the woods, or the mountains, or to the ocean, alone.

I’ve written a lot about her. Readers know our story. As I’ve shared before, and now share again because I cannot help it, my fingers are connected to my heart and so they type the story that keeps my heart beating.

Our children and grandchildren keep my heart beating as well.

Something one of our daughters said sort of encapsulates how any more I go about my days.

It was the last rowing race in which I’ll probably ever compete.

One of our daughters, with whom I had rowed together in training some 200 miles over time, was in the stern.

I’d never wanted to quit a race shortly after it started in my entire 27 on-again, off-again years of rowing.

Pre-race instructions were conducted under overcast skies.  Ripple-free, the glass-like water beyond the shore where we stood suggested course records might fall.

But at launch time the wind began to blow, the water turned to chop, the rain poured and without yet even taking a racing stroke we were soaked and cold.

I’ve always had trouble with pre-race jitters but sandwiched between 77 other rowers in 26 shells spread out over some 400 feet all to take off at the blast of the horn and somehow be funneled in less than four minutes to a space maybe ten yards wide, while shivering against the side-ways blown rain, ninety seconds into it I wanted to quit.

Struggling mightily to breathe, losing rapidly the ability to block out the ‘what-in-the-heck-am-doing-out-here’ mental anguish that robbed me of anything approaching what we’d discussed over and over again as a pre-race strategy, I seriously considered asking my daughter to turn back.

But I never got the words out. Partly because ‘let’s quit’ would have sucked what little bit of oxygen was available to my gasping lungs but more from the encouragement my daughter offered from her position in the stroke seat where she set the pace.

“We can do this dad.”

My daughter and I would finish last in our category.

But we finished which, by definition, is “to stop doing something because it is completed; to have reached the point at which there is nothing left to do.”

And finishing this journey is made possible by a family who declares what I cherish the rest of the way:

“We can do this dad.”