The quiet heroes keep our world going

IWAS listening to a radio interview with Seamus Heaney’s wife which revolved around the death of the acclaimed poet and her coping with it. There were two things she said that struck a chord. She said her husband “didn’t die too young but that he died too soon”; yet she was glad that “he died alive”.

It moved me how she accepted his death whilst not expecting it and it moved me how she recognised his death as the death her husband would “want” insofar as any of us “want” our deaths to be.

The conversation echoed a recent funeral I attended. It was of a wife to one man all her life and a mother to many. She was not taken too young either, but for all who belong to her she was taken too soon. She had her full health up to a week before her death so, like Seamus Heaney, she died alive. The comfort of that fact was palpable in the touch, faces and voices of those she left behind; her legacy.

Looking at her family of grown-up children, dignified, upright and tender, I admired her legacy. I realised that while we don’t all get to leave books of prose and poetry behind when we go, we do leave people behind upon whom we have our mark.

Today there is a lot of noise around achievement, status and looking after number one. And whilst those things have their place and merit, it strikes me at times that in over-focusing on our goals we lose sight of the ball and that in pursuing the glorious triumphs of tomorrow, we miss out on the quiet feats of today. Self-sacrifice has almost become a dirty word, reduced to misplaced martyrdom while silent self-sacrifice has become alien to a culture of unapologetic self-promotion.

Yet it is the quiet heroes of this life that keep our world going. More works of art are produced across a kitchen table, over a cup of tea or through an intuitive action. The art created might not find face on a wall, in a gallery or on a Pulitzer list but it is exhibited in the people we invest in through the guises that connect us.

Whether we like it or not we do impact on each other and whether we like it or not, we can be the difference between someone having a good day or a bad day or having a good life or a bad one.

Naturally it would be nice to leave some concrete genius behind when it’s our time to go, but that generally belongs to the exclusive few. Nice too to be let “die alive” but that’s another privilege not always afforded. Yet come our legacies, we have control. It might not garner us presidential eulogies or public mournings but do we want that? Enough I think to have those we leave behind stand dignified, upright and tender, feeling that death has come too soon even in old age.