I do not know what a hero is. I know I am not one, except perhaps to my golden retriever, Hopie. And that may be enough. I think parents are heroes. They take on the most important and unrelenting task in life and somehow make it work, the best they can. Survivors of grief are heroes. We watch our beloved die, watch their lives slip away to somewhere that the hearts beating in our chests and the electricity firing in our brains prevents us from following. And then, after suffering unimaginable loss and left with obscenely gaping holes in our lives, we preceed to get up every day. We breathe in and out all day long. We live, we laugh, we care.
That is perhaps the most heroic thing - to live life with hope, with some sense of purpose, after you have met Death. Death came to that room in my house, it stood there, as implacable and untouchable as the stars that sparkle in the place some call Heaven. No apology, no fanfare, no pain. And it just took him. Like it has millions of others. We only borrow our lives, I think. And we borrow with the knowledge that one day we'll die.
Dying is actually very easy, if you're the one doing the dying. If you're the one left behind, well then...that makes you the hero. To hear the song of life when you have heard the refrain in D Minor of death is a heroic deed in and of itself.
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