I have a lot of guilt related to Dad.  When I first came to Oklahoma from Alaska, I was in decent enough shape.  I had spent a few years in a retail job where I sat down most of the day, but I still needed to be able to be active.  The first few years, I was able to do a lot of things, from planting a garden that failed to mowing the lawn every week to grocery shopping.  But my health was negatively affected by a cut I got that became infected and I let it be the excuse that let me stop being active and gain a lot of weight.  And when I was just starting to recover from the worst of it, Mom passed and that sent me into a long depression.  And it was doing the same for Dad, only 300 ft away in his own house, but he might as well have been halfway around the world.  It’s true: everyone grieves alone.  When Dad’s health started to decline, and he was diagnosed with cancer, I was a very sick person.  I had no business helping to take care of someone else when I could barely take care of myself.  Dad wanted me around more, but it was hard to walk and hard to get down the steps.  It took a lot out of me to go up to his house that I limited those trips, which understandably bothered him.  I had not yet identified myself as the problem.  My nephew had, and I know he had a lot of issues regarding me.  I can’t blame him; he was correct.  I just wasn’t ready to hear him.  I could have made the changes I needed to make to help out more—help out better.  Would that have meant Dad would still be here?  Probably not.  He died of issues stemming from his cancer, and I doubt I could have lost enough weight to make his cancer go away.  But I could have been there more, and I do feel a lot of guilt about that.

I wanted so much to get my walk in this morning before 6:00am.  It was an arbitrary goal, but I did make it.  And that was including my ridiculous distraction trying to get a good video of lightning bugs.  I’m convinced they know when they are being recorded; they would all be lighting up in chorus, but as soon as I touched the red button there was darkness, except for one slowly blinking—a crumb for me.  That took me out of my walk enthusiasm initially, but I had only just started, so I was able to pick it back up an finished at 5:59am.

My legs are noticeably smaller than they used to be, but plagued by issues.  I think they have a tendency to respond negatively to hormonal changes.  Some days, they’ll be just covered in rashes or in pimples or they’ll be dried out.  I never know what kind of day it’ll be with my legs, and I’m really interested in not thinking about them all the time.  I don’t know if that will ever be my reality, but I would love that.

I’ve been making my housemate Justin’s meal plans, and it’s going fairly well.  He’s not 100% in it, as he still will add this or that to the day, which is honestly fine, but he’s definitely the type to give himself permission for a big thing since he was allowed a small thing.  It’s a different thing doing his meal planning because he thinks of himself as being on a diet which will eventually end.  I’m trying my hardest to make it so sustainable for him that he won’t want to stop, but he does love fast food french fries and if I don’t work them into a meal plan he will just end up eating them anyway.  For next week, I will try to incorporate that.  What I am trying to stress to him is that he can eat whatever he wants, but he needs to track that.  If he wants to mindlessly eat, he needs to eat a different way.  It’s perfectly fine to do that as well, but fast food is not on that plan.

Dad didn’t understand nutrition, and probably intentionally.  I never saw him as old, but he seemed to start thinking of himself that way.  He was never good at eating healthy foods honestly, but in the last few years he seemed to think it no longer mattered what he ate.  He was happy to just eat all the junk food and did.  But that also isn’t exactly true.  While Dad’s actions indicated a sort of indifference to his own life, as well as his frequent statement “I’m ready to go see your mama,” during his first meeting with the oncologist at the VA, things we very different.  It was August 2022, and he had just received the cancer diagnosis.  When we went into the meeting, I fully expected him to not want to fight, but he told the doctor he wanted to live and wanted to do whatever necessary to treat it.  Lifestyle changes are hard, and I was hard on him during those last few months.  But I also wanted him to live.  In the end, he couldn’t outrun cancer like he had hoped.  In the end, it didn’t matter if he had gorged himself on étouffée and apple pies.  But I can’t help but wonder how things might have been different if I had lost this weight ten years ago.  Would my parents have tried out my way of eating?  Would they have been healthier as a result, or was it just too late to turn back the clock?  There are so many things we can never know.

[Walk #91]