Miko Maciaszek/The Globe and Mail
My father is 83 and has Parkinson's. One by one, the disease is unplugging the cables that run between his brain and his moving parts. Lately, it has been his feet. He'll be at the kitchen counter in his Montreal condo and want to go to the living room, but even if the rest of him is prepared to make the trip, his feet just stand there, glued to the floor. He can get them going by swinging his arms like a goose-stepping soldier and creating some resonant momentum below his waist; or he can sort of shuffle his unco-operative feet about until the glitchy connection is re-established and they start to respond. Mostly he does a combination of the two.
His worry now – our worry – is that he is going to fall. That's what happens when your upper body takes off without your lower body. So I said to him recently, "The big thing for you for the next couple of years is making sure you don't fall down." When you're old and you fall, you can end up in hospital recovering from hip surgery while superbugs lurk about. A 2014 report by the federal Public Health Agency says 20 to 30 per cent of Canadians over 65 fall each year. That's as many as 1.5 million people. For many of them, it is the beginning of the end.
Falling. We do it our whole lives, from the day we take our first step. As children, every time we fall, we learn to stay vertical a little longer. As adults, falling is both literal and metaphorical. It's one half of the action required to summon the courage to get back up. We fall into ruin, and rise again. We fall out of love, and back in again. In sports, being knocked down means we're in the game, involved. Falling is life.
And then one day we fall and we can't get back up. Maybe that's why we bury the dead: so they're finally no longer at the mercy of the Earth's unforgiving surface. They can be at rest, liberated from the tyranny of gravity and listening to the thuds as the living hit the ground six feet overhead.
I forgot about falling until my late 30s, when I had two young children and found myself marvelling at the bruises and scabs on their knees, shins, elbows and palms. I realized at that moment that I hadn't fallen hard in years, and how taking a tumble was a fundamental part of childhood. It was synonymous with going to school, playing in the schoolyard, running at full speed across the lawn at your grandparents' house. Sometimes you laughed, got up and kept going. Other times you got up and went home, crying and wounded, and then you had to calculate whether reporting the scrape was worth its inevitable dousing in hydrogen peroxide at the hands of your mother. Often it wasn't.
Falling on the sandpapery concrete of the sidewalk was the worst. It always involved at least one knee and the palm of one hand or an elbow; a really major wipeout could abrade two knees and both hands, sometimes even a chin.
The animated sitcom Family Guy has a great recurring bit in which Peter Griffin, the title character, falls and scrapes his knee on the sidewalk, and then slowly inhales and exhales through his gritted teeth with a hissing sound as he clasps both hands over the wound. I remember doing that as my friends circled around and listened to my sibilant agony with a mix of sympathy and impatience. They knew exactly what I was going through, but they also wanted to get back to whatever it was we'd been doing.
In the teen years came organized sports. I played goal in soccer. I practised diving to the ground for hours at a time – I was a highly trained faller. Some matches, I would hardly get a scratch on me. Those weren't the good ones. As with all sports, you know you're really in a game when you spend a lot of time on your back. The basketball player who dives to recover a loose ball; the hockey player who gets flattened at the top of the opposing team's crease; the baseball player who slides into home at full speed. Falling means you are involved; you're a factor; that you're making a difference. If you think that's a guy thing, you aren't watching enough women's sports.
Skiing was another source of falling. Or crashing. The best recreational skier I have ever known was an Albertan who liked to go off-trail down streams and through back bowls. For him, he wasn't skiing if he wasn't about to wipe out. He pushed himself to the brink of crashing, off-balance, top-speed, his arms and legs all working to save him, and then he'd recover somehow and keep going. I'd watch with my mouth open as he defeated gravity and broke another half-dozen laws of physics. I followed him down those trails even though I wasn't nearly as good a skier. He always recovered; I always fell. It was glorious.
And then, slowly, a glorious day of skiing started to mean a day without falling. It happened in my mid-40s. I would get back to the lodge and feel good because I had never once lost control, or even come close. I stopped playing soccer around the same time. In my 50s I gave up hockey. By then I hadn't fallen on a sidewalk or a grassy field for years. In middle age, falling continues only as a metaphor. The iterations of It's not how many times you fall; it's how many times you get up are countless. Jobs, marriages, personal setbacks. We are tested not by the joy of being alive but by the injunctions of survival. We aging boomers like to boast of how many times we "fell" on our way up whichever ladder we believe ourselves to have climbed; how falling made us stronger, taught us a lesson. We know that 99 per cent of the wipeouts we had as kids were just spills, not lessons. But remembering them in an embellished light is our way of feeling young.
Today, at 55, when I fall, the very act of doing so hurts my muscles and joints as much as when I finally make contact with the ground. I avoid it like I avoid remarriage, that third drink, or skipping a run. I don't want to fall any more. This summer, I wiped out while playing tennis on a slippery court. I was sore for days. I still think about it. I may never play on clay again.
Being scared to fall is the opposite of how my father lives his life. He has been a star college athlete, a businessman, a politician, a traveller and an author. If he didn't have Parkinson's, he'd still be heli-skiing. He'd still be hiking the trails of New Hampshire's White Mountains with me and sailing around the islands of Greece. Even with Parkinson's, he has continued to travel. He says he can feel lousy at home or feel lousy in London, so off he goes.
For a while after the conversation with my dad about falling, I had second thoughts about what I'd said. I felt like I was asking him to forgo the possibility of that which is such an important part of being young and learning and growing. Tiptoeing around with a walker, or confining yourself to a wheelchair because you're scared of falling down – that's not living, right? I wanted to call him back and say, dramatically: Go ahead, Dad. Fall.
But I'm not going to. This isn't kids' play. It's not a metaphor. If he falls, it risks being a calamity. The Public Health Agency says more than half the seniors who fall break a bone, and they spend nine days more in hospital than the average patient. A fall can cause loss of autonomy, and thus greater isolation, as well as confusion and depression. Or it can cause death.
My dad can still engage the world with that most physically risk-free of acts: writing. But I want him to thrive as long as possible. If that means never falling again, that's a decent tradeoff. He has done it enough.