My Daughter Believed That She Was Nobody’s Hero
By: Dave Roberts
Tags: Death Of A Child, Life, Nostalgia, Assemblage, Heroes

My Daughter Believed That She Was Nobody’s Hero

Jeannine

After my daughter, Jeannine’s death in 2003, all of her favorite things were meticulously placed in several storage bins, which can be found safely tucked away in the lower level of my home. Whenever I am feeling nostalgic and yearning to connect with the essence of my daughter in new and novel ways, I will go bin surfing. The memories are inevitably pleasing to me, a reminder of the 18 years that she gifted me, my wife, and her two brothers with her presence on earth. Sometimes memories of Jeannine can trigger feelings of longing or thoughts about who she would have been if she were alive today. But those episodes are usually short-lived, as I have learned to accept and embrace the yin and yang of nostalgia and grief.

Jeannine’s Essay

I recently opened up one of Jeannine’s bins and an essay that she completed for her eighth grade English class was right on top as if it were waiting for me to find it. It was simply titled: My Heroes. In the opening paragraph, Jeannine defines what being a hero means to her:

A hero is someone you look up to, someone who is always there when you need them. The person you can trust. Heroes make you laugh when you’re crying. Some people only have one. I have more than one.

Jeannine went on to identify her mother, older brother, and me as her heroes, describing how our actions coincided with her definition. I want to share an excerpt from her paragraph about me so that you can get a brief glimpse of our bond:

We have a really good relationship. He’s always been fair in punishments. If we have a problem we can usually talk it out. I can be in the worse mood and he can always make me laugh, whether it’s with a stupid joke or an impression. He is a very strong man just by the way he handles all of his and everybody else’s problems. I love him a lot, and I hope he knows that.

I don’t believe that Jeannine’s essay found me to remind me of her love for me. In fact, the last thing that she said to me before she slipped off into a coma a few days before her death was: I love you. If anything, perhaps her essay was the impetus for me to examine if Jeannine herself met the requirements of her own definition of heroism during her short time on earth. With that being said, there are three events that come to mind:

Heroes Make You Laugh When You’re Crying

It was June 3, 2002. We just pulled into our driveway after an approximately 5 hour trip from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Earlier that day, we were informed that Jeannine had alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma (connective muscle tissue cancer) and a Stage IV tumor with extensive bone marrow and lymph node involvement. The oncologist assigned to her case informed us that her cancer was incurable. She further stated that our only hope was aggressive chemotherapy that would put Jeannine’s cancer into remission until a cure could be found. I was in shock and Jeannine was in tears. What I heard was that in all likelihood Jeannine was going to die.

I drove from Boston in silence and shock and Jeannine was in excruciating pain. Every bump in the road made her pain that much worse and she emphatically let me know how badly she was hurting.

After we got home, Jeannine settled in on the couch and I went up to her, buried my face in her lap, and cried uncontrollably. I don’t believe that I have cried that hard since. I eventually looked up and saw that her eyes were filled with tears. I told her that I didn’t mean to hurt her and that I was sorry that my driving caused her so much pain. Jeannine told me not to worry, that she was yelling only because her pain was so bad. She then said: Dad, if you can’t sleep and need to talk, come and get me.”

She was dying and at that moment the only thing she was concerned with was my well-being. She also told me that she was not going down with a fight.

Her words weren’t designed to make me laugh but more importantly, they stopped my tears and gave me the courage to go on.

The Person You Can Trust

Photo by Jannis Lucas on Unsplash

I have had a history of grand mal seizures since I was a young child. Thankfully because of medication, I have been seizure-free since the late 1980s. One evening when Jeannine was approximately 14 and cancer-free, she and her friend were sitting at the kitchen table in our house. During her conversation with me and my wife Cheri, she was agitated because an acquaintance was making fun of a person who had a seizure. Jeannine called this person out on his behavior and told him: My dad used to have seizures.

Jeannine trusted that I would always have her back; she let me know that she would always have mine.

Grace Under Pressure

This is a quality that I added to my daughter’s definition because she was the epitome of grace under pressure throughout her 10-month battle with cancer. I could list several examples of how she demonstrated grace and composure during her illness, but one event stands out. During the summer of 2002, when her chemotherapy seemed to have the greatest therapeutic effect, she went out to a restaurant with friends. Jeannine was wearing one of the many bandanas that she collected during her illness. When she got home she told Cheri and me that she overheard a man say these words to his daughter:

She is wearing a bandana because she is probably in a gang.

Jeannine, never one to not voice her point of view in any situation, told me that she calmly walked up to him and said:

I wear a bandana because I have cancer.

Nobody’s Hero

If Jeannine were alive today, she would reject the notion that the above-described events qualified as acts of heroism or that she was a hero because of her actions. She was not into labeling her human experience.

Jeannine was focused on living life to the fullest according to her own self-determined values while taking care of those family and friends whom she loved dearly. Through it all, she believed that she was nobody’s hero. But by her own definition and her actions she was a hero not only to me but to the 300 people who came to pay their respects at her wake and celebration of life.