How to Live a Long Life

I'm sure I've started more than one of these blog posts with words to this effect, but anyone who knew my Dad knew he liked a drink. Over the course of his life I think he put away enough to fill the Suez Canal.

For the last five or 10 years of his life as I watched him get older and his mental faculties hardly withered, I found myself marvelling at how he kept going. I was born in the early 1970s when cigarettes, fast food, alcohol and all the other vices we're plagued with in the Western World had already been identified as being bad for you.

I remember being a kid with mild asthma and being terrified of smoking because it seemed like grown ups all did it, which meant I would too one day, and (whether this actually happened or I dreamed it), a doctor said smoking would make asthma worse.

I thought if I ever touched a cigarette to my mouth I'd turn around to see the Grim Reaper already standing behind me. I pretended to smoke rolled up newspaper in the backyard one afternoon when nobody was home and felt sick with worry about it all night, thinking I'd wake up with testicular cancer or something (I hadn't even touched it to my lips).

Over the years, I'd also internalised enough at school, from TV news and from the general culture around me to know heavy drinking was bad for you. If you'd asked me when I was a kid or teenager my father would reach 79 years old and not even really face any serious health issues until the last ten years of his life I would have laughed.

Long before he died I asked myself plenty of times how he reached the age he did after all the abuse he put his body through, and one day I think I hit upon at least one of the answers.

What you'll also know about Frank if you knew him well enough to know his blood was amber with a frothy top was how easy going he was, how he went with the flow whatever was going on, how he never yelled, raised his voice or even so much as scowled. He smacked me exactly once – when I put a handful of dirt in the water of the above ground pool to watch it sink – and he didn't even yell while he did that.

I'm not under any illusions he was perfectly happy in life (though I think a fridge full of beer and his family being taken care of put him close to it), but he never seemed to suffer from any stress.

He wasn't a dreadfully ambitious man, going to work to provide for us and coming home to drink seeming to be more than enough for him. I'm the opposite, and the struggle to achieve what you want in the world can be very stressful. Maybe it was that.

But maybe it was something in his make-up. I'm like my mother, hot headed and short tempered, irritated if things aren't the way I want them. I've tried to be very healthy as an adult – I've somehow avoided smoking all my life after all, don't drink, eat well and exercise. But life hasn't been a bed of roses (as nobody's is) and with all the worry and stress I often wonder if my father might have been ten times healthier than I am regardless of what he put himself through, just because he shrugged and accepted everything.

Like I said on this blog awhile back, a toolbox once fell on his leg and cut it open to the extent he had to get stitches, and he went straight back to work afterward. That's not the constitution of a man of ill health. Until he got diabetes and all the other effects that were inevitable with ageing caught up with his lifestyle, I don't remember him even having so much as a cold.

I don't know where it came from and I'm sure it wasn't easy to live with someone so quintessentially passive, and I also don't know if he appeared that way to everyone else in his life or if he was only ever like it to us (but I don't think he was a complicated enough man to be such a different person in different circumstances), but there was a calm and a stillness about him I really wish I'd got some of.