Patrick Swayze Lives On In Others

It’s amazing how a small boy in Texas can grow up to influence the life of another small boy born ten years later in London. When I was a child I grew up with a father who owned a video shop, I used to cycle to my father’s video shop every weekend and even though my father had left my mother when I was only a baby and they no longer spoke, I would still make the effort to see my father as much as I could. During my early teens I would visit him in his video shop but the signs of him being the selfish man that my older sister had warned me about began to show the more and more I visited him. Often I would arrange to visit him at the weekend and then arrive only to be told by some stranger running his shop that my father had gone on holiday for three weeks, the same father who only days ago had refused to give my mother any money to feed her two children. It was always the same story, even though he earned thousands of pounds every week and had bought himself a house in London and a fleet of antique cars he always insisted that he had no money to give my mother even though by law he was supposed to pay her £50 a week. When I reached my late teens I realised that my father was the selfish man that my sister had warned me about, and I stopped visiting him. He never made any effort to get in contact with me and even though my mother never said a bad word against him because she wanted me to decide for myself what he was like, I later came to realise why she had no respect for the man who left her in a council flat with two babies to support on her own. There was only one thing that I owe to my father, and that was the free videos that I was allowed to take home from his video shop.

Even though I was underage I was allowed to take home any videos that I wanted apart from a few really bad ones like “The Exorcist”. However Patrick Swayze movies were always allowed and when I first watched him in “The Outsiders” I was completely infatuated with him from the get go. I never had a brother or a real father figure and when I first saw Patrick play the older brother to Rob Lowe and C Thomas Howell and how he tried his best to be a father figure to them both, I decided then and there that when I grew up I would be just like his character Darrel Curtis. I watched every one of his movies and the older I became the more I wanted to be like all of his characters that he played, from Johnny in “Dirty Dancing” to Dalton in “Road House” and to Sam in “Ghost”. I later came to realise that it wasn’t so much his characters that I loved, but actually Patrick Swayze himself shining through these characters. I had grown up watching him and idolising him throughout so many years that he had become a kind of father figure to me, and one day when I was around 19 years old I decided to find out a little about the real Patrick Swayze. Maybe it was because he was famous, or maybe it was because he was very good looking but I had a suspicion that he was a bit of a player, how could he not be I thought when he had so many woman throwing themselves at him. It was then that I discovered he was married to Lisa Niemi and had been faithfully married to her for many years, and that was when my respect for him grew even more. He was nothing like my father who had been a womaniser his entire life, Patrick Swayze had respect for woman and he had values, he was one of the good guys and I wanted to live in his footsteps even more. I am now 34 years old and I am proud to say that I have never cheated on a woman in my entire life; I have not even had a one night stand. It was because of Patrick Swayze that I have grown up with the values and respect for myself and for the woman that I have relationships with. It is his gentle tone and his strength that I have copied throughout my life until they were no longer copies but real traits of my personality.

When I found out that Patrick Swayze had cancer I was very upset, but when I saw him carry on being the same old Patrick and carry on filming his television program “The Beast” I was so proud of him. I was also proud of myself for finding somebody so great to idolise at such a young age. I have read so much about Patrick’s devotion to his mother and how much he loved her, and I am proud to say that I have grown up with the same respect and love for my own mother. Patrick Swayze had a strength about him, whenever I felt sad as a child or deflated as an adult I would always put one of his movies on and they would give me strength, somehow by watching him I would feel stronger and calmer. He was magical on screen and my hero of screen, and even though it saddens me that he has died, at the same time it fills me with hope knowing that he is watching over us with the other angels.