There are things I did during my wife’s final illness that, had you asked me beforehand, I would have said I could never do. Not would not, could not. The distinction matters.
When the time came, I did them. Not heroically – there was nothing heroic about it. I did them because the fact of her need, fully accepted, left me no honest alternative. The decision space had collapsed. What had looked, in the abstract, like a wide field of options turned out, on the ground, to be a very short list.
On that list, when she wasn’t hospitalized, was waking every forty-five minutes through the night to help her roll over. She could not do it herself.
I thought about this recently when reading a Medal of Honor citation. The recipient, in the aftermath, said what so many of them say: “I just did what anyone would have done.” This is usually taken as modesty. I no longer think that’s what it is.
Consider what Major Jay Vargas faced over three days at Dai Do, Vietnam, in May 1968. He entered the second day already wounded from relocating his unit under fire the day before. He led the attack
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