Hero or Not a Hero
My wife is in her eighth month of treatment for breast cancer which includes a mastectomy, many chemotherapy sessions, and a six-week radiation regimen. All things considered, she’s held up remarkably well. A friend and fellow cancer survivor referred to her recently as a “hero” for her spirit and attitude. She at first blanched at the word, knowing my own (and probably every other disabled person’s) aversion to that hackneyed term. Casually thrown around by people praising you for entering an elevator in a wheelchair all by yourself, it’s a term of toxic positivity. It doesn’t lift your spirits. It makes you embarrassed, self-conscious, and, God forbid, “special.”
Then my wife stopped to think that, to the contrary, this was a genuine compliment from someone who’s experienced the same dispiriting ordeal. This wasn’t some busybody in the check-out line. This was honest testimony from a fair witness. And it gave my wife a good feeling.
The original derivation of hero in ancient Greece means protector or defender, like Hercules or Achilles. But English is a rubbery language, so we’ve stretched it to mean damn near anything you want, not unlike “awesome,” “amazing,” and “cool.” “Boy, that was an awesome ham sandwich!” That doesn’t mean these words are devoid of meaning. The bombing of the Twin Towers was clearly amazing. The kid who subdued the mass killer at the Chinese dance hall in Los Angeles was clearly heroic. But most uses are not so clear-cut. You have to consider both the context and the effect.
To bend a really inane movie cliché, heroic is what heroic does. In a sincere comment, as opposed to a word as glibly thrown off as “thank you for your service,” the word is a slight overstatement of “I admire your spirit,” or “You have a great attitude,” or “You’re tough.” If you are a paralytic out there, has anyone ever called you “tough”? How did it make you feel? If your level of self-regard is low, you probably think that is absolute BS, even coming from a person you like and respect. You don’t imagine yourself as tough. But if you have gone through all the hoops that your average paralytic has gone through -- and I, and probably you, know people who’ve been at it for fifty-plus years -- you’re tougher than you think.
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People with disabilities don’t like to be singled out solely for being disabled. It’s as simple as that. Just being disabled and being able to maneuver through life like a “normal” person gives you no more status than normal. And, hey, that’s not bad. Normal is a high watermark of acceptance for someone widely tagged as abnormal. The best films and TV shows make this point. The movie “CODA” was universally praised not because a deaf family performed extraordinary feats of derring-do. They performed the awesome feat of being normal -- making a living, raising kids, arguing, laughing, cussing, loving, and fretting. Are they heroes? Only, perhaps, to a Deaf fifteen-year-old seeing a reflection of his or her real life on screen for the first time. To the rest of us, they are just remarkable people.
When a dear, brilliant, decades-long friend said recently that he thought “I was the toughest person he knew,” I knew he meant it. (I guess he’d never met Muhammed Ali.)
Like an elixir, it momentarily wiped away all those self-defeating thoughts that had invaded my brain. I was touched and encouraged at the same time.
So, try interpreting “hero” as tough, and that includes tough enough to blow off all the mindless, patronizing compliments thrown at you. And finally, when you give a personal compliment to someone, disabled or not, be sure to mean it. The emotional message will transcend the often confusing, ill-defined rhetoric.