The day after high school graduation I was riding my bike near the park in my town when I happened to see my mother in her car. It wasn’t just happenstance—she was looking for me.

“Get up to the doctor’s office,” she said. “Your father is having a heart attack.”

Life’s dramatic moments never seem real when they happen. At the time I felt like I was in a movie, and when I remember it today, in my mind’s eye I watch what happened as an observer rather than a participant.

I see a teenager with longish hair wearing gym shorts and mustard yellow Converse tennis shoes bending over his 10-speed and cranking the bike for all it was worth. I hear the heavy breathing as the teenager sprinted the bike the two miles to Dr. John Hippensteel’s office in Robinson, Ill.

I see the 18-year-old watching his 46-year-old father being loaded into his car for the trip to the hospital and I see the father’s face, white but not ashen, in discomfort but not in excruciating pain.

When I think of the days following the attack, I remember scenes from the mental movie. There’s the son sitting in the hospital lobby waiting for the five minutes of every hour that he can visit his father. There’s the son talking to the local newspaper to update the health status of the town’s mayor, which was what my father was. There’s the father being discharged from the hospital.

This 12-year-old video has been sitting on my mind’s shelf gathering dust, but last week I had occasion to play it again. My father called and said he was undergoing heart surgery for a triple bypass. One artery was 95 percent blocked and another was 100 percent blocked.

One more Florida retiree is going under the knife this week. Surgeons will harvest yet another set of leg veins, another chest will be cracked, another heart will be held in a doctor’s hands.

My first reaction was perhaps an uncommon one. I was angry with him. In 1976, he got what a lot of heart attack victims never get—a second chance. He took advantage of that chance by getting his weight down, exercising and watching his diet. He even stopped smoking.

In 1976, he was scared. Later he was scared, too. He feared he wouldn’t reach his 50th birthday. Staying fit was truly a matter of life and death. His heredity he could not control—his father had died of a heart attack before his 50th birthday.

My father’s 50th birthday came and went, as well as his 51st through 58th. Somewhere in those mid-50s, his attitude changed. The warning grew faint, the altered lifestyle too confining. He started smoking and he ate like he had always eaten—praise the fat and pass the mayonnaise.

It does not speak well of me to have these emotions. I’m a bit ashamed that my first reaction was not concern for his health, but rather a self-righteous anger about the frailty of humans in general and parents in particular.

How could anyone ignore the warning? More importantly, how could my father show human weakness? Confronting the mortality of one’s parents as well as their imperfections in one week is a bit much.

I’ve stopped wallowing in my emotions about this, but I wanted to set them down in black and white before they became merely a distant memory.

I won’t send this column on to Florida. I won’t talk to him of missed opportunities, nor will I reproach him for eating that extra Twinkie or skipping his aerobic program. He can do that for himself.

When I talk to my father, it will be about my concern for his recovery and my love. I might also tell him of my fears of what it would be like if he died. I’ll probably tell him I love him.

Sometimes you should just leave the past behind and concentrate on the future—a future that allows for the failings that define our humanity.

It’s a future that allows not only for my father’s failings, but mine.