Gentle reader, my dad had a heart attack late last week. Atttaaaack! He had one artery totally blocked. They flew him in a helicopter while his heart limped along trying to catch up. We visited him in the hospital, watched him while he slept, and attempted to miss (not always successfully) viewing his little tush peeping from his hospital robe when he finally got up to walk around.
Fortunately enough, in my life and generally in the lives of the scrappy catgut crew, theory follows, buttresses, and substantiates real life. So it did not surprise me, as I sat at the foot of my dad's hospital bed, to open Barbara Ehrenreich's "The Hearts of Men" only to find that I had just begun her chapter on heart disease.
It turns out that the growing prevalence of male heart problems in the 20th century has been tangled up with the way we think about men and their burdens. (I'm not being facetious here, gentle reader. I am very much aware that men have burdens.) In previous centuries, women died earlier from pneumonia, childbirth, and other pesky problems, while men lived longer. But come the 20th century, for a host of reasons we do not really understand but have come to summarily refer to as "stress," men officially became the weaker sex, dying younger than women.
Evidently this "stress" factor is a myth. Women work the same long hours that men do, many in the same competitive environments, and their hearts do not fail them. But in our collective consciousness, we came to accept that these heart attacks were the indication of a social calamity: that men were over-worked, over-tired, and over-burdened.
My dad has a phrase that I swear is straight out of Leave it to Beaver: "From dawn of day to setting sun, a father's work is never done!" I pretty much agree. I've always felt that my dad was over-burdened: by a job I wasn't sure he wanted, by guilt that he didn't remember my teacher's names, by the sense that he could be doing something else with his life.
According to Ehrenreich, men in the 50's who had heart attacks were considered lucky (if they survived): while recovering, they were given permission to escape the rat race for long enough to re-think their lives. This is just what I imagined for my dad as I sat with him in the hospital. I want him to wake up and smell the coffee. Of life.
All of this has only further convinced me that we're still living in the '50s. For in-depth musings on the peculiar thing that is a dad, check in later.
it is pretty striking that this happened to your dad precisely during this time of considering a new career, being anxious about what to do, how. quite fortuitous you are. voracious reading, even by hospital-bedside.
luff,
luff
Posted by: ilana | February 23, 2006 at 09:54 PM