The Art of Falling Down and Getting Back Up

The author with his mother, circa 1973. Deagle family photo (detail).

By early September 2021, I had been feeling like William the Conqueror. I was months into a fitness and dietary regime that saw me continuously shedding pounds, and getting almost within striking distance of my goal weight. Physically and mentally, I felt like I had energy and self-discipline I had never known. Self-improvement had become a compulsion, seemingly with a will and momentum of its own. In short, it felt like I had reprogrammed myself in a way that simply eliminated negative habits and imprinting from my inner algorithms.

And then I got the phone call that my mother was in the hospital after suffering a stroke that left her in a helpless and uncommunicative state. As humorist Allen Saunders once observed, and as John Lennon would slightly paraphrase decades later, “Life is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans.”

As of that phone call, my time was taken up with driving my father to and from the hospital, while also trying to keep my children on track with their…