She's an everyday kinda hero

The Boston Herald

She has always rebounded. That's the thing. Push her down and she comes popping back like one of those weighted inflatable toys that kids can punch but can never topple over. She has persisted like the Energizer Bunny, and rallied like the Six Million Dollar Man, and though life has taken her breath away, time and time again, it has never been able to stop her.

Just one more trip to the hospital. Just one more close call. Just one more step back from the starting line, but that's okay because we've been here before.

We say she is Molly Brown and praise and encourage this survivor, and she has always recouped. But not this time. This time she is worn out. She picks at her food and eats with her eyes closed and when you go to empty her dishwasher, she doesn't say, "Don't bother with that. I'll do it." She says, "Thank you," and even her voice is tired.

She sighs when she tells you she has yet another doctor's appointment because she is far wearier than she has ever been. She is weary of the fight to live, weary of the effort it takes to do everything, to shimmy out of bed and into the wheelchair and into her clothes and into the bathroom and down the hall and out the door.

And what is the point, she wonders. Why am I still here?

Last Friday, lying in a hospital bed, she asked this. She wasn't complaining. She was simply wondering aloud. How could she have survived yet again? Just two days before, her blood pressure had soared to new heights. No reason for it, just old age. The world started spinning and she was spinning, too, and she was sure it would never stop.

But it did stop, and here she was, returning from one more trip to the edge.

There was a time when she'd walk up and down the hills of Glasgow two miles to school, two miles back, morning, noon and night. Every day at lunch, she stopped at the butcher's and bought the meat for dinner. Ever day after school, she put on an apron and helped prepare dinner.

She walked from Battery Park to St. Patrick's Cathedral. She drove from Boston to New York so often she could have been a bus driver. She danced and she sang and she gave dinner parties and chased after trains and escorted groups of tourists all over the world and tended her garden and her children and nursed her mother and her sister and so many of her friends. It seemed as if she would never stop.

Now her life is a bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen interrupted only by visits to doctors and hospitals and an occasional meal out. It could be worse, she knows. But it's bad as it is, and some days are worse than others.

Old age has been a fierce and determined enemy. But through it all she has been brave and accepting and cheerful. Every day, she dresses in a skirt and a blouse, combs her hair, makes tea in a teapot, pours it into a china cup and puts on a happy face. Every day, even now, as tired as she is, as low as she feels, she asks visitors, "How do you feel?"

Some people perform a single heroic act. They race into a burning building or breathe life back into a dying child, and they're called heroes and they get a medal for valor. And they should. But there are other heroes people never hear about, the chronically ill and the very old who are fighting long, losing battles with their own bodies.

Day after day they get up, get dressed and go on, even when they don't want to. They are ordinary people with extraordinary courage. And they are heroes, too.