Celebrating A Father’s Determination

MARY ANNE CASTRANIO, Staff Writer

Published: October 7, 2004

Our family just celebrated a birthday this past weekend, an event that we all thought we wouldn’t get to celebrate. My father actually reached his 76th birthday. You might wonder why we’re so surprised. Maybe it’s because he’s long since used up his “nine lives.” Maybe it’s because I told him that he can’t die until he’s walked me down the aisle at my wedding. (I’m still single.) Maybe it’s just because he is a living miracle.

Over 40 years ago, my dad had a heart attack. He was just 34 at the time, with four small children, ranging from me (at age 5) to my youngest brother (newborn). My mother and father must have thought that the world had caved in. In 1962, what was the life expectancy of a heart patient?

At that point, many people he knew then, including the people he worked for, decided that he wasn’t going to make it. They were all wrong—he didn’t give up, and neither did we.

My father has an interesting life story, from what I’ve been able to piece together. (He never really tells the stories in chronological order.) Raised in an impoverished family in Juniata, Pa., he managed to attend the University of Notre Dame as a Holy Cross seminary student. He earned a master’s degree in philosophy there, going on to additional studies at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., among other places. While he obviously ended up not being ordained as a priest, even today he has a deep love and respect for our faith, something that he’s passed along to his children. Occasionally, when the large and active family he has begotten gets too noisy and chaotic, he retreats to a quiet place, perhaps to ponder why he left the seminary in the first place.

He felt called to another purpose sometime in the early 1950s, when he joined the Marine Corps during the Korean War because he believed that fighting for our country was the right thing to do. As a pilot of Corsairs, helicopters and other interesting aircraft, he has regaled the family with amazing stories of his time in the service. He doesn’t dwell on the harsh aspects of the war even today—he has always emphasized the camaraderie and shenanigans. A Marine buddy of his once told me that my dad was a prisoner of war in Korea (not one of the stories he had shared with us). He escaped because it was so cold that no one was watching him, so he just walked away.

He said that the discipline of the seminary prepared him for the discipline of the Marine Corps. I believe that somehow this discipline was a gift from God, who prepared him to be one of the strongest, most determined-to-be alive people I’ve ever met.

He met and married my mother in the mid-1950s, which probably saved his life.

My mom is a nurse, retired now, though do nurses ever really stop being nurses? And during the years that followed that first heart attack, she watched him with a fierceness that few husbands enjoy. Together they have been a team for almost 49 years, best friends united in a common cause of life, helping others in need with generosity and enthusiasm.

He has had many close calls over the years, beginning with more heart attacks in his 40s and continuing with any number of medical emergencies. Somehow, he always knows how to describe how he’s feeling. And somehow—with the help of God’s grace, I’m sure—my mom always knows when it’s time to go to the hospital. I can’t remember how many heart episodes he’s had now. He had quintuple bypass surgery when I was in college, repeated 12 years later. He’s had numerous stents put into his arteries, including the carotid arteries in his neck. He’s had a couple of small strokes.

I’m sure there are former co-workers of mine who would not believe that my father is still alive today, based on the number of times I jumped in the car to make that long drive from Atlanta to North Carolina to wait in a hospital waiting room with my siblings, hoping and praying one more time that we would still have our dad when the morning light dawned.

And even now at 76, he still hasn’t given up on life. I think of him as a “pro-life” kind of person—absolutely convinced that although heaven awaits, life is still worth living and pursuing with all the zest one can muster.

In some outrage of injustice typical of life’s foibles, my father was diagnosed with esophageal cancer two years ago. This kind of cancer doesn’t really go away. And we have all grieved mightily for the additional painful indignities he has endured, after years as a cardiac patient, now as a cancer patient. When I first heard, I thought, “How much more does he have to endure? Why cancer, after all these years of heart problems?”

He made it through chemotherapy and radiation, but he says he’ll never do it again. The treatment to “cure” him almost killed him. And despite the fact that he could not have surgery to remove the tumor, he is in remission at the moment, a miracle for which I am humbly thankful while amazed that once more God has spared his life for a while longer.

When he was first diagnosed with cancer, he took my mom to the jewelry store in our little hometown, where he bought her a huge sapphire necklace and said, “This is for our 50th anniversary that we’re not going to have.” That was as close as I ever heard him to giving up. That was over two years ago.

He has endured, buoyed by prayers from friends and family and by his own faith that God still needs him here. Although his fighting spirit (Semper Fi) has weakened, there he still is, enjoying his life as best he can. We continue to be blessed by his example of stoic determination to live, to get to that next day, to wake up and breathe and pet his dog and take his walks and bicker with my mother and give his kids advice and prepare to vote in the next election … to do all of those normal activities that make up the happiness of living each day.

And I still have questions for God our Father, but they are more, “Why are we so blessed to still have our father? Why has he lived on when so many other wonderful people have not?” I am thankful that we have had this living model of “prayers answered.” I just hope I can follow my father’s example of never giving up when life is still there to be lived.

I treasure the words of Deuteronomy (30:19-20), “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the Lord, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him. For that will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land …”

Happy Birthday, Dad. Thanks for choosing life.