Iron Dad: A Cancer Survivor's Story of Discovering Strength, Life, and Love Through Fatherhood

By Paul Weigel

"Paul Weigel knows what it means to struggle, and his story is sure to energize and inspire you to live every day to the fullest, as he has chosen to do."

-Dean Karnazes

• Language: English
• Publisher: Three Piques Blinked
• Release date: Jun 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9798989953417

Paul Weigel

Paul Weigel is a father, a six-time Ironman triathlete, a college professor, and a self-described professional dabbler. A lover of the outdoors and hiking, he spent much of his life in the Pacific Northwest, finishing countless races and climbing many mountains including Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, and Mt. Adams. Now living in Arizona, he is exploring different ventures while checking things off his bucket list with regularity. But his real passion, and his real inspiration, is creating unforgettable memories with his daughter.

Book preview

I Just Hurt

What do you say all those times someone asks, How are you?

So many times, I would look up and say, I’m fine, assuming the other person didn’t really care, that my answer needed to be I’m fine, how are you?, leading to a detached chat to find common ground⁠—the weather, weekend plans, or a sporting event⁠—before getting on to business or walking by, the interaction over just as quickly as it started.

Of course I was fine. How could I not be? I owned a condo in the shadow of the Space Needle, had a good job growing my career exponentially, and was stereotypically working hard and playing hard. My grad school buddy Todd and I would wake up on Sunday mornings and watch football pregame activities with Tim, the head bartender at the Belltown Pub, our local hangout, before he opened it for everyone else. Tim would make blueberry pancakes and bacon on his own personal grill. A Sierra Nevada Pale Ale or a screwdriver was readily in hand. On Tuesday nights, we’d bring in dozens of friends and watch wrestling, not believing it but still pretending the WCW was real, not like the WWF that everyone else watched on another station.

But the truth was I was miserable. The dull pain of solitude and loneliness and fear that had started in my gut as a kid had become paralyzing, like a million blankets smothering my emotions, the pressure so much it hurt to breathe, and I was unable to share my experiences with someone⁠—anyone⁠—I cared about who also cared about me. I was so scared that to even say hello to anyone, let alone to show them my vulnerability, was overwhelmingly, excruciatingly exposing and suffocating. So, if you’d asked me, if you’d really asked me, How are you? I would have said, I hurt. Agonizingly so.

It was so terribly ironic, being the child of two psychologists. While I was growing up, my friends would ask me how often I was asked how something made me feel. But I never had that experience from my mom or dad. Every conversation with my parents, I felt my thoughts and emotions were being analyzed, interpreted, projected, the information stored later for critique, an ongoing experiment conducted with emotional remove. Anytime I’d try to express myself in a situation where I just needed someone to listen, Mom’s response was to psychoanalyze what happened and explain it away, rather than confront the actual pain. Too many times, our conversations would end with me screaming, shouting, or pleading, Stop analyzing and just listen!

Did I feel love? Far from it. Like a patient more than a son? Likely so.

Painting

Mom, is it OK that I go to the side yard to paint the shed? I said to her one Saturday morning, waking her up from her slumber. If I had learned anything by the age of five, it was to make sure to get permission to do something. And we were always taught to act grown-up, to do the right thing⁠—that’s who we were and what we did. We were Weigels, after all.

I don’t remember having fun or finding peace during my childhood. Laura, my sister, and I were always held accountable for following the rules, even at a young age. We were supposed to be as mature as possible, to do what we were told, and to not consider doing anything otherwise. While fishing for hours on end, we were supposed to sit there and not talk. We weren’t allowed to explore nearby trails because we had to stay close, seen but not heard. Straying from their rigid parameters was unacceptable. Love was withheld whether we stuck to these rules or not.

OK, Paul, Mom said to me, cracking open her eyes. We had a regular ritual each weekend. I was always up early, hours before anyone else, even in kindergarten. As a result, I was left to take care of myself for hours those mornings in the cold-tile basement, watching TV, adjusting the rabbit ears to make sure I could see Scooby-Doo, Road Runner, or The Jetsons. No wonder I hated cartoons later as an adult.

The October chill had kicked in overnight, the grass frozen with a thick white frost, my breath steaming from my nostrils. Our house, on the edge of Fort Collins in the shadow of the horse’s tooth of the mountains, might have well been a little house on the prairie, parts of the landscape still not touched by what would become an urban sprawl. The side yard was much more of an unclaimed pasture on a hill, never filled by a horse but perhaps a goat or two and Dad’s two broken-down Corvair station wagons haphazardly parked so he could salvage parts to keep another one running. The shed? Built from leftover boards I had grabbed from the next-door neighbor’s home construction, randomly stacked in a pile of creativity.

There I was, that cold day, almost immediately splattering gray paint all over my new blue-and-brown jacket and my corduroy pants as I opened the cans. It was far too cold for anyone to be out painting, let alone a kindergartner, especially at 6 a.m. And after only a few minutes, I came back inside, trying to warm up my little body and frozen beet-red fingers, not even recognizing how poor of a decision I had made as the sun peeked its way out, announcing itself to warm the day.

Once my parents saw what I had done, the paint I had splattered on my brand-new, expensive clothes, I was in trouble, more than I had ever been or could ever possibly imagine. How could I have been so stupid? I should have known better than to go outside and try to paint something at all, let alone dressed the way I was.

Forget that I had followed the rules and asked permission. Forget that I had done the right thing. What I’d done, making such a terrible decision, according to my parents, was wrong, and my punishment was to spend time with my dad, driving to stores to get new clothes, a day of being continually reminded of how ridiculous I had been to have such an inane thought, let alone to act like the five-year-old boy I was.

This disconnect with my parents was forever ingrained⁠—that no matter how hard I tried to do things right, my attempts weren’t recognized or appreciated. If I did something wrong, it meant a more critical, mean, and evaluative future with them, forever feeling judged.

This was a dynamic I never wanted to have or share again, yet I desperately yearned for some type of meaningful connection.

The Green Room

Your mom is too stressed taking care of you kids, our dad said to me and my sister, Laura, a few years later when I was around ten, looking down at the notes he had written himself on his bright-yellow legal pad as a script to read to us. We had been holed up in the TV room downstairs in our new house in Littleton, a suburb just outside of Denver, the thin green carpet barely cushioning the tile floor. Once again, we were in the basement, out of sight and out of mind.

"And I’m too busy working, so you two are responsible for taking care of yourselves. That means you make your own meals, do your own laundry, and get yourself to and from school. Don’t beg, and don’t complain to your mom. It’s time for you to grow up, now. No whining."

Making a child invisible cuts deep.

As children, we received no love from our parents and found them more and more distant as we grew up. I never heard the words I love you from either of them growing up⁠—ever. To this day, I’m not sure either one of them ever said those three words first to me in my entire life, and I didn’t learn to say them out loud until I was an adult. I never saw my parents kiss. Even hugs were nonexistent. That was part of being a Weigel.

Laura, who was only eighteen months younger than me, and I lived under an expectation that we had to behave perfectly⁠—or at least provide an image of perfection⁠—even if our home and family were an illusion, that everything was to appear OK, and even exceptional, on the outside. But look underneath the surface: we were fragile and destroyable, like a Norman Rockwell portrait painted on dissolvable paper.

Every time we got together as a family of four, someone left the room in tears. Dad completely disconnected from our family and was never home, hiding behind an excuse of being a workaholic, perhaps even secretly living a dual life, while Mom fell deeper and deeper into a state where she was completely disengaged from most of the world’s reality, aimlessly walking around the house in her extra-large nightgown for days, wax earplugs crammed so deeply into her ears she was oblivious to all, her hair matted and perhaps colored depending on the time of year, the TV turned to the cable directory station so she could zone out to the blaring Muzak, staring absent-mindedly at the wood-paneled wall, drinking her instant coffee, nibbling her breakfast bar each morning when she finally woke up, if she even got out of bed.

The water leak in our house’s front entry dripped down with regularity from my dad’s bathroom for too many years to count, seeping into the tile that had splintered into pieces over many, many years. The small stain expanded until the ceiling eventually collapsed, water pouring down into the bucket on the floor during every shower. Why the damage wasn’t fixed for five years, I’d never know.

At least our train wreck of a house was an easy excuse to keep anyone from coming in. The house entrance, let alone our family, was too embarrassing.

Our Commitments

We never gave up on our commitments, ever. Doing so just wasn’t acceptable. It was never, ever allowed to admit a mistake or an error in judgment, and we had a responsibility to never give up. That was part of being a Weigel.

By the time I was eleven, I was already packing ice against my swollen knee with Ace wraps. The doctors always called it Osgood-Schlatter’s disease every time I complained about it, a knee condition athletes can develop in their teens, and said that I shouldn’t worry about it. But I always knew it was something much more serious, ever since I slammed my knee against the steel sprinkler cover left off in the middle of the football field, a stone’s throw away from the large gray high school that the world would eventually come to know by name. Even as a kid, I’d swear that I could always feel a chip floating around under my left kneecap, in addition to a knee click, pop, and catch.

Climbing stairs was like stabbing a rusty screwdriver beneath my kneecap and just scraping back and forth. Even occasionally playing any sports or light hiking was too physically overwhelming, and I’d take a combination of Advil, Tylenol, and aspirin just to get outside on the diamond, or to go outside to have fun, even though seeing anything felt impossibly blurry because of all the medicine. That pain continued and increased until my first surgery during college at eighteen.

By the time I was twelve, finding enough players for our baseball team in late June was nearly impossible. It always seemed others were on vacation or doing something fun. For my family, though, it was different. Another obligation we couldn’t back out of, another commitment we could not deny.

The season, by all accounts, was long and it would be over as soon as the Fourth of July holiday arrived. Coach Locke was determined and demanding and took any fun out of the game (or the remaining fun that hadn’t already been sapped out from the knee pain) with his high expectations and mercurial approach. Our seasons started with promise but folded under his overwhelming intensity.

Both Billy and Ray, our two starting catchers, were out that day, off to Disneyland or into the mountains. They were getting a respite, away from the baseball fields and a coach I hated more than I could ever express. But once again, here I was, playing because it was an obligation, even more so this exceptionally hot day in the mid-90s, a rarity in Colorado in the early 1980s.

The temperature outside felt off the charts, and I had a strong fire going inside, too, with my own fever of 101.5. I was a cold, clammy, overwhelmed mess of a boy who just wanted to stay home in bed, sleep, and recover.

I just feel so awful, Dad. Please can I stay home today and not play? I said, trying to stand up for myself yet knowing what the answer would be, regardless of the circumstance.

Paul, Coach said we were short on teammates, Dad said sternly, brushing off my questions with a matter-of-fact righteousness and a hostile tone that rendered any discussion over before it had started. It was what we would come to call the Weigel Snap in later years, a combination of anger and bitterness and rage and condemnation, like pulling a choke collar on a dog as hard, quickly, and sternly as possible, draining the life out of it, showing who was in charge, followed by a deep, long stare.

I had made sacrifices for the good of others like this too many times as a kid, playing in games after cutting my arm open on a rusty chain-link fence; or with a black, blue, and swollen eye; or with the knee pain that I’d rate a 10 out of 10. There was no room for arguing with my parents or pushing back. I would go to the game and be a good teammate because that’s what we were supposed to do. Coach needs you to play catcher today, and we’ve promised.

End.

Of.

Story.

Somehow Coach felt that a full two-hour practice before the game made us more ready for competition, even if it was draining our energy. By the time we completed infield drills, Coach Locke hitting the ball around the diamond, getting everyone warmed up before the game, I was already melting away in catching gear, with shin guards and a chest protector that felt like a heavy winter jacket, and even more so now with the fever.

Randy, our first baseman, zinged a throw to me at catcher that I missed, the sphere falling idly by home plate. By that point I wasn’t thinking clearly, desperately wanting to go home, and the ball bounced off my glove and dropped to the ground, just behind where Coach was swinging as part of our infield drills.

The crack of the bat on the ball was nothing compared to the bat shattering the bridge of my nose with Coach’s follow-through.