Dad

One year ago, my dad suffered from a broken back after an accidental fall. Think about our vertebrae like a stack of rectangular sardine tins. These cans are durable and valued for their long shelf life. Yes, they're perfectly fine until we hit the age of 40, when the cans begin to lose up to 5 percent of density each decade. It turns out the sardine gets stolen with time, and the cans get less strength.  

Imagine stepping on an empty can as hard as you can and you will have a rough sense of how a collapsed or flattened vertebra looks like. 

Another trick to keep the cans steady and sturdy is tying the stack with cord or string. If you stop and think about the string for a moment, it is pretty like the core muscles that stabilise our spine. But there's a good chance that our muscle mass drops with age, starting around age 30.

Not all gone, but enough to give my dad a breath-deprived and panicked feeling. He walks discreetly, taking small steps as if to move across an ice-covered driveway. When he had another fall at home last weekend, he couldn't stand up for nearly an hour. He lied under the bathroom sink, breath growing short and head spinning. A knot of anxiety and terror burgeoned in his head, and panic strangled my dad so tightly he could barely breathe. The kind of terror that made him lose the train of thought and all his marbles. 

"Relax," I managed to get home and help my dad, scanning the scene for blood stain and his body for open wound. I tucked my body under his, slinking my arms around his waist. He felt frailer, smaller than when we last hugged, like time is stealing not only years, but pounds from his trunk and spine. Somehow he looked weak but heavier than what I wish to move.

"How ya been, dad?"

My dad didn't move an inch. My sister, a godsend, arrived half an hour later. 

"Can I go over with you, my steps of bringing dad back on his feet, step by step?" I pretended to be calm. "First, bring me the blood pressure machine. Next, get both of us two pieces of chocolate." 

Moving our dad from the floor to his wheelchair took us another half hour. My sister and I exchanged looks. She gave me a worried look, and I drew a deep breath, steadying my heartbeat. It's not that my backache made my heart race. I simply worried about another fall and downward spiral. The situation is somehow like watching a Jenga game with collapsible sardine cans stacking one over another. One wrong move and the cans will topple and all fall down.

In the end, I took dad to the hospital that night to check out. Soon after entering hospital, it seemed like his body was starting to fall apart. He got more and more confused. None is more daunting than calming a delirious elderly who has been restrained in an unfamiliar environment. He yelled like a hailstorm, thumping on the hospital bed. 

You don't need a PhD to work out the solution. I tried my best to convince his doctor to send him home. Trust me, going home works like magic. 

Home sweet home. His smile at home soldered into my memory. It's the one I'll never forget. 

Colour

Books about migrant workers and racism are nothing new, but what Amanda Peters has told us in her debut novel The Berry Pickers is colourful. 

The Indigenous Mi'kmaq people, native to Canada's region near Nova Scotia, are primarily having skin colour from light to deep brown. The novel casts light on a Mikmaq family who arrives to Maine every midsummer. Together with a caravan of dark-skinned workers, they work hard picking berries till sunset for white landowners. This family work harder than most workers. They never pretend to have picked more than they had, when other lazier ones try to stuff the bottom of the crates with green leaves and stems.

The family can roll up the passenger-side windows on the truck to keep blackflies out, but they can't stop the bites of blackflies in the field. The white folks claim that Mi'kmaq people make such good berry pickers because something sour in their blood keeps the blackflies away. But everyone knows that isn't true. 

Blackflies don't discriminate. Men do.

Freedom

Worthy is written by the American entrepeneur Jamie Kern Lima who aims to build self-worth in girls and women. 

You don't rise to what you believe is possible, you fall to what you believe you're worthy of.

The sentence summarises Jamie's answer to the question if you were smart enough, or if you were enough. A lot of us could get lost in our setbacks. Jamie Kern Lima had her setbacks too. She wrote this book after she had been rescued from hardship and low self-worth. 

Jamie Kern Lima grew up with an alcoholic father. Her parents divorced when she was six. She then was alone a lot because her mom and stepdad both worked long hours. Eventually, she was handcuffed for riding a freshly stolen car, and ushered into a juvenile detention centre. Between moving schools and homes, she was voted "Biggest Procrasinator" in high school yearbook. She made efforts to unlearn the limiting beliefs that she was unworthy of love. Surprisingly, it has a happy ending. She became the first in her family to graduate college. She graduated at Washington State University with a 4.0 GPA. No one knew then that their valedictorian had worked in a strip club.

Jamie's story struck a chord in the hearts of us who couldn't put words to our knowing that one can break free of destiny. I happened to have watched the movie Tokyo Taxi with my wife this week. I dare say the movie is in tune with that of Jamie Kern Lima's. The central figure in this movie is a woman who first lost her father during the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, and then lost her first husband who repatriated to North Korea. If all that wasn't enough, her second husband was an abusive rascal who gave her hearbreak and anguish. Her way to break generational cycles of abuse is a forceful argument that we're worthy of love. 

As Jamie Kern Lima tells us, where you come from doesn't have to determine where you're going. And that your past can only hold you back if you live there.

Courage

Many of us use the word bravery with romantic promiscuity. Even more young people think of themselves as brave heroes, flying the way Icarus did. And then, too often, they fell and plunged into the sea, drowned.

Fear need not be shameful, nor bravery praiseworthy. But the difference between bravery and courage is crucial to us. Taylor Reid, the author of her ninth novel Atmosphere, tells a wonderful story about these two words. 

Instead of flying to the sun, the characters in this novel are female astronauts working out their way to enter low-Earth orbit and put up a satellite. Going into space is not for the faint of heart. The checklist is long, and the simulations even more lengthy. 

One of the astronauts has figured out the question from her dad: Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but strong enough to do it anyway. This quote moves me every time I read it.  

Bravery is almost always a lie. Courage is all we have. Roger that.

Pleaser

If I had to sum up, in one sentence, the key message in The High 5 Habit written by Mel Robbins, it would be something like as follows (call it the first law for an adult).

There is only one person's opinion that matters: your own.

If you're growing up in a community with social code – and who isn't? – it's hard to get out of the habit of looking around for approval. There is nothing stopping me from pleasing other people. Many of us, especially those Enneagram Type 2s, struggle to say "no". We tend to betray our own needs for the fear of other people being upset with us. 

Mel Robbins is one of the people pleasers. Driven by a hobby of buying antique pool table, her father gave her a painstakingly restored Brunswick pool table as a wedding gift. The gorgeous table took up half of her playroom. Mel's family rarely used it to play pool, leaving the pool table sitting like an elephant in the room, covered in Legos. For many years Mel wanted the space back but ended up walking around the pool table to get from one end of the room to the other. 

She couldn't move the pool table because it seemed like a slap in the face to her parents who had given it to her with so much love. She was compromising her own needs of having an office. Mel was too scared to disappoint her dad, and twisted herself in knots. Which, in a way, she had. 

This story has a positive ending. It took Mel Robbins 45 years to learn the lesson that as scared as you are to disappoint someone that you love, it's always worth it to be honest about what you need. One fine day, she picked up the phone and told her dad that she was going to hire professional pool table movers to dismantle his gift. With love and care. And courage.

Memories

A few days ago, I finished The Paper Palace, an irresistible read with heavy theme. In this gripping novel, Miranda Cowley Heller describes a 50-year-old mother who grows up with dysfunctional family dynamic, sexual assault, and an unspeakable story of murder.

Consider this quote from the story: "We drag our past behind us like a weight, still shackled, but far enough back that we never have to see, never have to openly acknowledge who we once were." This quote comes from the traumatised mother who returns to the summer camp, nicknamed the Paper Palace, where her family has spent every summer for generations. She returns to a cemetery with lawns dotted with the grey teeth of the dead. That cemetery is where her stepbrother had been buried. Back she comes, as ever, to a hidden and painful memory of sexual assault (by him) and murder (of him).

The problem with recovered memories of pain and aches is that no one can decide what it is for. It comes into being as we try to move forward. The need for a forgotten memory is a matter of debate, but the need for soothing the pain of memory is a matter of fact. This morning, I attended a church funeral. That is the second time I visited the historic St Andrew's Church. More than three years ago, one of my patients died of metastatic lung cancer two years after the diagnosis, which was unfortunately delayed. I was there and paid respect to her. This time, another patient of mine died of the same diagnosis, which I made immediately after seeing her less than two years ago. 

Sadly, the disease came too early this time.

Dad

If there were a pie chart that divided up my time over one week, the exploded spice that emphasizes the best moment would be watching movie with my wife.

We watched the British drama film The Thing with Feathers this Friday, before I read the original novella Grief Is the Thing with Feathers during weekend. That's a story of a newly widowed father of two boys. A heavy story of grief. 

Regardless of how you feel about the author Max Porter's writing, he does certainly know how to evoke the fear and embarrassment of fathers like me. Once upon a time, the father, before he lost his wife in the book, had to bring his children to go sledging in the park when his wife fell sick with flu. Both sons whinged because their toes were aching. The father felt embarrassed to be exposed as wholly reliant on his wife. He didn't know where their hats were. He couldn't get their mittens. He forgot to ask his sons put on Wellington boots.  

My goodness, the story sounds familiar. Let me be clear. I'm no better. I remember years ago receiving an email from my daughter's primary school teacher reminding the daddy to properly dress a kid when the temperature was lower than 10 degrees. There are few gaffes more embarrassing than a dad's oversight that leads to a kid being "detained" in classroom when other classmates are playing outdoor during recess.

Uh-oh.