This picture (which also leads off the video below) is of my father at a birthday party for me. From the looks of things, I'd guess it's either the last or next-to-last I experienced on earth with him present. He wasn't working by then––you can tell from his enormous gut––so it was after his incident of August 15, 1973. He looks distended, and when I look at that photo I can't help but think he's on heavy medication. (Weight gain is listed as a common side effect of the anti-psychotic Thorazine, which was popular at the time for people in my dad's mental state). 

Frankly, he looks fat, neutered, and ready for death. For a boxer and a tough guy like Thomas J. Wingate to get so out of shape must have been a tremendous sign of failure. By this birthday of mine, he had clearly thrown in the towel on keeping it together and trying to stay healthy. 

It surprises me not at all, then, that I view getting fat as a huge personal failure. I've always been a big guy (six-foot-four), and at age thirty-nine I was still a robust, hockey-playing 218 pounds. Never a serious athlete, but always in good shape and active. Then I finally screwed up my back to the point where I needed surgery and became a dad and everything fell apart. The pounds kept finding their way to my body, and with every one I felt more fully the failure that my dad must have felt when he let his own body go.

By the time I was forty-seven I'd ballooned to 259 1/2 pounds thanks to inactivity and stress eating, and I stopped weighing myself. Sluggish. A loser. Ashamed of myself not because of society's standards but because of witnessing my father's death spiral. Watching my father get fat and give up.  

I've lost a lot of that weight since then, but I'm not back to hockey trim yet. And I don't want to talk about what the scale says here because it's less important for our purposes in the labyrinth than the psychic effects of extra weight. When I look at that picture, my dad feels like Darth Vader calling me over to the dark side where torpor and self-abnegation reign. 

Give up, he says. What's the fuckin' use? 

I judge myself––always and every day––on whether my body resists the temptation to throw in the towel like he did. Maybe this internal struggle will result in me getting healthier and living longer. Maybe it's an unnecessary stressor, an outmoded internal debate that causes me to compare myself to my dad and binge eat my way out of the ensuing mini-depression. 

Still too early to tell. I will run a double-blind scientific experiment on myself and get back to you at my earliest convenience.