In Loving Memory of My Hero

Originally published August 18, 2021.

I am a hospital chaplain. I have seen a lot of death in my job. Covid brought an unimaginable level of horror and death. I saw people as young as eight to over eighty suffer and die. There are times when I think that I will never recover from the toll of all those deaths. In 2019, right before Covid, I was visiting a patient in the ICU, and this patient looked at me and said, “I know you from somewhere.” I said, “I’m sorry. You don’t know me.” I thought he was hallucinating. He said again, “I know you. You are a good guy. We had a lot of laughs together. How is the factory?” I said, “I’m sorry I’ve never worked in a factory my entire life.” A couple of days later, he became coherent. He was sitting up, and he looked at me again, and he said, “You look really familiar to me.” I said, “What do you do for a living?” He said, “For years, I worked at Halls Book Company.” A light went off in my head, “I’m sorry, I might owe you an apology. You might be confusing me with one of my brothers. My brother Clarence worked at Halls Book Company.” “No,” he said, “I don’t know a Clarence.” I said, “My father worked at Halls Book Company, but you’re probably too young to have known my father.” I said, “My brother Robert.” He said, “Ah, Robert, yeah. Robert is a great guy. He was the life of the party. We had some great times together.” I called my brother Robert, put him on the phone as the patient asked me to, and they had a wonderful conversation remembering their good times at Halls Book Company.

He was right; my brother was always the joy of the party everywhere we went. He truly is my hero and the joy and light for others. Robert taught me that heroes come in all shapes and sizes; they come from all walks of life, races, colors, and creeds. Heroes are important. They help us to understand our direction in life. They make us feel good about ourselves, about the world around us, about what we think and how we think. They help us to set goals and objectives, and they allow us to find our way in a world filled with discomfort, pain, suffering, and sorrow. That’s why having a hero is so essential.

One of my earliest memories is that, believe it or not, as a two years old, my oldest brother took me to visit our mother’s aunt. She lived in a project building on State Street on the south side of Chicago. In those days, the elevators were not sophisticated. They did not have sensors in them; they did not open and close if you stood in front of the door. I was standing in this elevator with my oldest brother, Robert. An alarm went off. A light started flashing. I was frightened. Robert had enormous hands. You can imagine, if he were to slap you five, your hands would hurt for weeks. Robert had to hold the door open so we would not be stuck in there for hours. With his left hand holding the door open, he reached down with his right hand, grabbed me, and threw me out of the elevator. I thought he was God. Robert will always be the strongest, kindest, most compassionate person I have ever met.

You know how you go to a funeral, and people stand around and talk about how wonderful the person was, and everybody’s crying and upset. And then, later on, you meet somebody that says these people didn’t even like her or these people didn’t know him, or why are these people so upset? Or you go to a funeral, and there are deep dark secrets that everybody’s holding. The tension can be cut with a knife. Or there are unresolved issues that the family has never really dealt with. None of this is the case for my brother Robert.

If you have not gotten it by this point, you should know that my hero, Superman, the person I admired more than anybody else on the planet, recently passed away. I am not sad, but I will miss him. I will always love him, and I know he will always love me.

Robert is the kind of guy who took care of other people. Once a month for the last two years, he would call me to go and pick up supplies for another friend in their senior living building. That friend was feeding the building, so my brother paid for those supplies. On one trip, a young woman came up to me and said, “Hey, Robert is like my dad,” and Robert hugged her and smiled. He turned to this young woman and pointed to me, and said, “I want you to meet my baby. This is my child.”

Robert always saw me like his baby. Even though I’m approaching 60, he still viewed me as his child, despite having two children of his own. I cry for them. I feel sad for them. I weep for them and my other siblings. I know that I was not unique in my family, but Robert made me feel like I was.

Everybody was Robert’s best friend. There is not one single person I have ever known or ever met who had anything bad to say about Robert. He indeed was one of the happiest, kindest, most excellent individuals I will ever have the pleasure of knowing and having as a part of my life.

I’m sorry if you did not get to meet my brother. I’m sorry if you did not get to see his smile, hear his pleasant laugh, and see his ever-ever-optimistic point of view. I’m sorry there are not more people just like my brother Robert who saw hope in everything, believed in everyone, and loved incessantly. There is no exaggeration here, no hyperbole, no pain on my part. I will miss him. There is sadness, but I get to live in the joy of knowing that I knew one of the greatest joys that God has ever created, who is my hero, my brother, my loved one.

I will not be sad for long because every time that sadness tries to come over me, I will remember the joy and love that he gave me. It also helps that my youngest child, my daughter, was born on the same day as her uncle Robert.

I say to my family and to those who lost someone during this horrible Covid time, when you feel sad and cry, try to remember the good times that your loved ones brought to you.

I say to you: heroes don’t die. They live on in our memories and our lives forever. I hope you all have a hero as I did.