My dad saved me, and I killed him

Ikilled my dad. I didn't blow him away with a gun. Instead, I let him die. I pulled a kitchen chair up next to him and watched him struggle to breathe on the floor. The skin on his face turned a reddish-purple. His neck took on a bluish tint. Both his hands clutched tightly at his chest. And suddenly, the white in his eyes became spider-web etched, in blood-red lines.

Why did I do it? It's complicated.

I loved the son of a bitch more than anything on the planet. You see, 28 years earlier, I was born a cripple. A breech birth, feet first, my head stuck in the birth canal. By my first birthday, I couldn't crawl, stand or walk. My right arm and hand awkwardly clung to my torso. At first, the doctors told my dad I would never walk or run normally because the muscles in my right leg and arm would continue to atrophy.

When I was 3, Dad brought me to Children's Hospital in Boston for answers. They told him I had cerebral palsy. A loss of oxygen to my brain had destroyed brain signals to the right side of my body. The doctors recommended that I attend private schools. They gave him a long list of places that could better care for cripples like me, and they prescribed a full-length removable leg cast to wear at bedtime.

He refused to listen. No son of his was going to be a cripple. He found a doctor who instructed him in how he could take the place of my injured brain. Every morning before breakfast and every evening before bed, my dad placed me on the bedroom floor to exercise my right leg. The muscles were shrunken and twisted together. His job was to craft them straight, at any cost. Back and forth, up and down, my dad pushed and pulled the muscles into shape. He stretched them until the heel of my right foot evenly matched up to the heel of the left foot.

My Aunt Helen told me the process was almost unbearable to witness. She said the sounds of me screaming soured her stomach. I was too young; I don't remember the pain. But my mother said my dad would cry. He couldn't look into my eyes. His tears made wet stains on my T-shirt.

But my dad's exercise of passion didn't stop there. For my 13th birthday, he threw me a special party. First, we ate my favorite peanut butter cake. Then he allowed me to open every present but a large box neatly trimmed in colorful birthday-balloon wrapping paper. When everybody was gone, he marched me into the basement to open the box.