My Father's Heart: A Son's Journey

By Steve McKee

Book Overview

Sixteen-year-old Steve McKee watched his father die of a heart attack on the couch in their TV room. A lifelong smoker and workaholic, John McKee had been floored by a heart attack five years earlier. The McKee clan-perhaps including a demoralized John himself-had long been waiting for the other shoe to drop. At age fifty-two, Steve McKee learned that he was his father's son more than he had ever hoped-he, too, has serious cardiovascular disease. Haunted by his father's seeming surrender to the condition, McKee set out to find the man who died before the son could know him. In so doing, what might he, Steve McKee, learn of himself? Chronicling the disorienting first days following John McKee's death, My Father's Heart is an extraordinary story of an all-too-ordinary scenario: A father dies, a son remains, and the loss casts a long shadow across a generation. Rich in evocative detail of time, place, and family, it is a powerful memoir of love, forgiveness, and finding oneself.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0738210978
• ISBN13: 9780738210971
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong Books
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.5" x 1.3" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

A Moving Tribute about Loss, Love and Health by Kaolin http://ltar.biz

Steve Mckee's memoir begins with a stark, sad event in his life when he was an adolescent. He and his dad were watching a popular TV program when his dad died of a heart attack. No one else was with them at the time and McKee's life has been shaped and reshaped by this critical moment in his life. When an adolesecnt male looses his father at that critical point in his life, it often leaves him in a fantasy world about his father that may be hard to live up to. Why? There is often no goodbye beforehand and of course there is never a future together. There may be no one else for the young man to lean upon. The past becomes merged with the loss and as one gets older one wonders if his own memories of himself as a boy, and those of his father are myth, truth, or a little of both? How does one discern and plan for one's future as they mourn a loss they must take with them for the rest of their life? In "My Father's Heart: A Son's Reckoning with the Legacy of Heart Disease" Steve McKee answers those questions and more. Since his father was a smoker McKee delves heavily into the world of addiction from medical perspectives and even more specifically the impact addiction has upon family life. Yet there is an ironic twist in McKee's story because he ate healthily most of his life, exercised daily and did not smoke, however at the same age his dad was when he died, Steve learned that he was also at risk. He was advised to take medication for his condition and met that advice with resistance and fear. However, after spending time reflecting and researching the subject he soon complies and enters his mid-fifties with meds-in-hand. Had he been a smoker we can assume those are choices he may not have had the privilege of making at all. McKee's book is about loss, fear and reconciliation. It is also about heart-care and reducing the risk factors that accompany heart disease. His book is a source of encouragement for those who have heart problems and a reader for those who know what it is to lose their dad when they are so young. As you travel through his life with him you will meet other family members, be taken back and forth in time, transported from place to place as he addresses his own health care crisis. You will experience the search through his pain, the surrender to grief, and the curious ways in which the death of a parent spirals in and out of his life throughout his life. McKee cares about his readers while parlaying out to us the latest facts and fictions regarding heart care treatment. His desire to see to it that we see a doctor to find out what is really going on inside our own bodies is transparent. One would think his dad must be pleased with his son's work and if you are smoking a cigarette now you might put that cigarette down and never care to pick to pick it up again. Kaolin is the author of a forthcoming book from Crandall, Dostie & Douglass Books, Inc. titled "Talk About Race: A Workbook About White People Fostering Racial

An engaging and informative memoir

Author Steve McKee's father died from a heart attack in 1969 when he was 50 years old. His father, John, was a lifelong smoker with a stress-filled job. Steve had tried to get his father to quit smoking and change his lifestyle, but to no avail. Sixteen at the time of his father's death, Steve vowed to avoid his father's bad habits. He never smoked, exercised religiously and tried to avoid job-induced stress. Yet, as age 52, he found out that he had cardiovascular disease. My Father's Heart is "the story of one father, one son and one family." It is the story of a son's journey to get to know his father better and to better understand himself. "I have become who I am because of Dad, because of that night," writes McKee, who was alone with his father at home when he suffered the fatal heart attack. McKee tells the story starting with the first day he returned to school after his father's death and concluding with the day his father died, a week earlier. McKee does an excellent job of sharing memories of his father, detailing family history, interspersing information about cardiovascular disease, and discussing growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It's a memoir worth reading.

A book for my children

I heard about the book, "My Father's Heart: A Son's Journey" during an interview with the author, Steve McKee. The reason for the interest was loosing my husband suddenly last July 30, 2007 to a massive heart attack. We have 4 children, 2 boys then 2 girls. They range in age 41 - 47 years old. The children have become very conscious of making sure that they are getting thorough doctor examinations every year, something that, especially the men, have not been faithful in doing. They all do exercise. So this part is good. However, they are all having a very difficult time in the grieving process because of the closeness to their father. He was a very animated and loving man, so the void is great. When I listened to the interview on the Today Show, I thought that this book might just be something that the children should read to help them in their loss. I purchased 4 copies and gave a copy to each one on Valentine's Day. I have started to read the book and have found many similarities that I know they will be able to relate to. I was very happy to have found the book on Amizon.Com. The cost was a lot more reasonable then if I had bought these copies at a book store. I received the books 3 days after I ordered them. This book depicts the love of family and the loss of a very dear member of that family, even though the father, knowing his condition, did not take care of himself as he should have.

Outstanding. A tender remembrance of a father deeply loved who died too soon...

A touching book that brought me back to my own childhood...I am thankful to the author for impressing on me a very important lesson, that is, even though our fathers may pass on physically, their memories continue to live in our hearts forever influencing us in very important ways. Even though I was fortunate to have my father until he was 84 years old, it will always feel that he too was taken from our family too soon. My father's death, like the author's, from a heart condition, taught his children how very important it was to take better care of ourselves physically before it was too late. I especially appreciated the author's depiction of his childhood years, growing up in a neighborhood similar to my own in suburban Detroit. The author brought it all alive for me. This book is a GREAT read and I highly recommend it...

The heart is very personal

The number one killer in the United States has a personality. In Steve McKee's family odyssey--as with most people's--heart disease is very personal. It can snatch the life of your father, turn your world upside down, make you obsessively interested in your family tree, drive you to swear oaths of healthy eating and exercise, wring your worried hands over living long enough to see your own children make it to adulthood, curse the universe because you got what your father got, and finally understand that the life you want is up to you. "My Father's Heart" is as much about healthy hearts and loving hearts as it is about hearts under siege.