For many years as a reporter for People magazine, The National Enquirer, The Globe, and The National Examiner, I was up to my scruples in sensational tragedies, from the O.J. Simpson story and the Jon Benet Ramsey mystery to Princess Diana’s death and countless others. Then the Columbine story broke and my life changed forever. Columbine was a devastating incident, but the irresponsible mass media hysteria that followed was worse and undeniably brought about a copycat shooting by a similarly deranged youth the following month at Heritage High School in Rockdale County, Georgia.
As I saw society depressed more and more by this journalistic “tragicide,” I knew that there were hundreds of uplifting and incredibly dramatic stories that go unwritten or relatively uncovered every day, involving people who have overcome life’s greatest obstacles to achieve happiness for themselves and their loved ones. So I quit my job and began writing about those people in my first book, Triumphs of the Heart.
In writing that inspiring book, I found people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and cultural perspectives from one end of the country to another. What they all had in common was that after losing everything they originally thought life was about — success, money, comfort, or luxury — they realized that life’s true worth lies not in the results but deep within the process of noble and sincere living. They realized that happiness wasn’t even about overcoming their hardships but about loving others and yourself every day and in every way while enduring those hardships. Even as their own lives were plagued with troubles, they all understood they had the capacity to love and respect humanity and the right to be loved themselves.
They understood that since the beginning of time mankind has had to care for each other even as pain, suffering, and hatred exists, and even as we toil to make a living by the sweat of our brow and contend with the struggles of everyday living.
I leaned that the people who ultimately master the ability to live in this inspiring manner are real heroes to themselves and to the rest of the world. And in the grand scope of life that means that everyone can and should be a hero. Because living like a hero will yield unimaginable joy, success, and contentment for you and the rest of society.
At the heart of this hero mindset is a set of principles — integrity, duty, self-respect, faith, devotion, altruism, compassion, listening, and forgiveness — that makes our commitment to love others real and brings about remarkable changes in the lives of others as well as our own.
We can and should be a hero at our jobs, at home, even when we are waiting in line at the grocery store. In every single relationship or encounter, we must ask whether we are respecting human dignity or instead thinking about what we will gain or lose from the interaction. If we answer the latter, then it’s time to change our game plan and step up to the plate to be a hero.
The next time you are feeling down or depressed, try this simple little exercise below. It will remind you of your own heroes and your own ability to be a hero. I guarantee you it will pick you up and head you in the right direction. I call it “The Road Map to Happiness.”
1. Who do you love (pick one person) and why are they so special to you?
2. What’s the nicest thing anybody ever did for you and how did it inspire or help you?
3. What’s the kindest thing you ever did for someone else that helped to make their day or their life better? How has 4. helping that person enhanced your own life?
4. What is something positive which filled your heart with happiness that you saw somebody else do yesterday or today to help someone else? It could be a family member, a friend, or even a complete stranger who you felt made somebody happy.
5. Who loves you and how do they show it? How has their love changed your life?
Watershed events, like a parent’s illness, can move us towards our own healing as we reflect on family, relationships, and soul.
A few months ago, while bogged down in the ultra-important details of promotions, media interviews and speaking engagements for my latest book, life got in the way.
It was 9 a.m. when I called my mother’s house to say hello and was greeted by the cold, distant voice of a young man I didn’t recognize — a paramedic.
“Your mother fell and she’s not responding, so we are going to transport her to St. Joseph’s Hospital,” he informed me.
“What?” I shouted back almost uncontrollably. “What’s wrong?” “We don’t know,” responded the voice. “She is not responding.”
The lack of info was terrifying. The 10-minute drive down to the emergency room was an eternity — rushing against the lights while fighting mentally not to rush to conclusions or imagine the worst. A parking nightmare later, I was in the emergency room and no longer had to imagine.
My mother was not moving! My eyes frantically searched out the heart monitor to assure myself she was still alive. I watched and waited helplessly as a whirlwind of people and machines surrounded her.
“Do you know what year it is?” a doctor shouted at my mother, but there was no response.
Again he repeated the question. I watched my mother’s lips desperately, waiting for anything. Then suddenly, happily, I saw the slightest movement and heard the sweetest sound: “2009,” came back the answer, faintly. Thank God! She was OK, or at least aware.
The storm of activity around her slowly dissolved and tense voices grew calm, a sign I hoped that things were improving.
A doctor turned to address me. Finally, information.
She had suffered a stroke, and there was a blood clot about the size of a quarter located in the middle of her brain. It was located too deep within the brain itself for them to relieve the pressure or drain the blood without threatening her life. But nobody knew how extensive the damage was yet, or the danger. All we could do was to wait — but for how long?
A friend arrived. She was a physical therapist, so she could help me to understand what the doctors weren’t yet telling me. Thank God, I thought. But her professional opinion only sent chills down my spine.
“She will recover, right?” I asked her. “She could,” my friend cautiously replied, “and she might not. There is no way to know. But either way her whole life will change, and so will yours. Just do the right thing and trust God.”
But there were a whole lot of “right things” to be done. And God didn’t seem to be saying anything I could understand.
How much would she recover? When would she recover? How would we care for her, what would we do with her house, with her expenses, her bills, her cat? Where was I going to find the strength, the wisdom, the time and the resources to handle this? Why did this happen now?
A wall of anxiety and depression overwhelmed me.
As I stared at her lying there in a mesmerizing mesh of tubes and wires, my eyes suddenly fell on the most unexpected thing — her hands. Suddenly, they didn’t look old to me, but were the same ones I remember reaching out for when I was a child, the ones that always reached back.
I reached down and squeezed her hand. Without a word spoken, she squeezed back. I knew instantly what I needed to do and how I would find the strength to do it.
But it was just the beginning of a journey that would transform my life, her life and the lives of everyone we knew.
PART 2
Within 24 hours, my mother had regained her ability to speak and use of her right side. Thank God, I thought, at least she was out of the woods. Not quite.
“We need to do an MRI to determine if the bleeding in her brain has stopped,” she said soberly. “But your mother refuses. She is afraid of the machine. She says she’s claustrophobic.”
“What!” I screamed. Why had nobody told me? I only went home for a few hours to shower and clean up. My mother was barely conscious and they were leaving life and death decisions to her!
“If we can’t do the MRI, we can’t do much more for her,” the nurse said coldly. “If she doesn’t want the MRI we cannot force her. But then we don’t know if she is going to have another stroke.”
Here’s a little info for any of who have never been in the hospital – when you don’t follow orders, they stop giving them. They were giving up on my mom.
But at least I wasn’t the only one pulling my hair out. My brother arrived a few hours earlier. We were scared, angry – and now frustrated with my mother. Why was she doing this? She was a headstrong woman – I had learned to accept that for all its pros and cons over the years – but now it was endangering her life, and it was hurting us.
We spent the next hour trying to talk her into the MRI. Finally someone made a simple suggestion – what if they allowed me into the scanning room with her while they performed the MRI. Amazingly it worked. Suddenly she agreed.
Later that night we entered the room together, and she entered the narrow tunnel of the MRI machine, while I held her leg from outside the tunnel. After a half an hour of incredibly loud clicks and clacks that could have traumatized even somebody who wasn’t claustrophobic, it was done.
I needed to sleep, so I grabbed a few hours back home then rushed back to the hospital the next morning for the results. But I spent the next 24 hours waiting for info that never seemed to come. “We are still analyzing the results,” was the common chorus.
As I glanced up at the Crucifix on the wall, I said a prayer. Please send me a sign. Just then as I looked away, I saw a familiar face in the distance. It was a friend from the local coffee shop. What was she doing here? Then I remembered – she was a doctor—– a neurologist, and of all the coincidences – in THIS hospital?
“Please help me,” I practically begged her. “My mother had a stroke and nobody will tell me anything.” She led me down the hall to the doctor’s lounge where she showed me everything – the results of the MRI, my mother’s case file—and she carefully explained every single detail of my mother’s case.
“It looks like the bleeding has stopped, and I don’t see any permanent damage,” her words were like a gift from God. “I think she could have a full recovery. But–” she added, “it’s up to her when and how that happens.”
The next day they moved my mother out of the ICU – next stop the rehab facility. She would have to quickly learn to trust people she didn’t know who were telling her to do the opposite of what her body was saying– to walk when her legs said they couldn’t, to stand when her body said rest, and to stop worrying in the midst of the battle of her life. That was not an easy thing for a woman who had had trust issues her whole life.
I had to trust God would put people there to help me, especially the rest of my family. That was easier said than done. We had not been a cohesive unit for a long time, not since my parents split up after thirty years together.
We all had our reasons – for not trusting, not working together, for running away. None of us had done the best to help each other. Now we had to.
PART 3
Hospital rehab programs place people in one of two categories – those that heal and those that don’t. Unfortunately they placed my mother into the ladder.
She was scared, stuck literally and metaphorically. And rehab programs, especially those funded by Medicare, don’t tolerate anything less than success. If you don’t make progress, you’re out and with only a few days notice.
So suddenly and without warning they asked us to take my mother home– helpless. She could not even get herself in and out of the bathroom, and she could not afford 24-hour a day home health care. Their solution – a nursing home!
Now telling my intelligent, capable, and headstrong mother to go a nursing home was a sure way of getting her to use her good hand to throw a heavy object at me. Plus, it didn’t seem right. She deserved a real chance to recover her independence.
Out of the darkness came one voice that cared– the physical therapist friend of mine who came to comfort me when my mother first had her stroke.
“Let me work with her,” she practically ordered me. “If we can get her into my center for one month, maybe we can get her well enough to go home.”
It was worth a shot. I had to trust my friend, and my mom had to trust me.
“Mom I know you can come back from this,” I explained. “But it’s not going to happen here. We need to go somewhere else for a little while – a month. I promise we will bring you home after that.”
“You are the boss,” she said simply. I was flabbergasted. It was tantamount to the falling of the Berlin Wall! My mother had ceded control. Now it was up to me – to us – to deliver.
A team of newly dedicated therapists at Arizona Grand inspired by my friend worked on my mother seven days a week. The first day she stood on her own. The first week she was walking. By the end of the month she was doing sit ups and yoga. There was no way to explain the progress. Actually there was. They cared. My mother knew it, and she trusted them.
Each night either my brother or I visited, trying to boost her moral. Sometimes we succeeded, and sometime we failed. Sometimes we looked past the person – the mother, the human – we were too obsessed with fixing her.
But little by little we cleaned up our acts and tried to respect, to appreciate and to make each other shine. We scrubbed twenty years of grime and grease off the floors and the walls of her house. We changed the carpets, and cleaned out the past as much as we could. She did her best to let us let go of the past.
A month after my mother’s stroke I was speaking to my brothers almost every day; we haven’t done that since I was a teenager. My oldest brother – who kept to himself too much for his own good—became my teammate. Together we worked on the game plan for my mother’s recovery.
Today my mother is home. She is walking more, talking more every day, but we depend heavily on the kindness of friends, new and old.
We cannot “make’ her heal. But every day we learn to love, to grow and to rejoice a little bit more instead of squandering these days wishing things were different.
I reflect on that as I slip in a CD of old jazz standards. I ask my mom to stand up and let go of her walker and hold onto me instead. For the first time in over a decade I dance with my mother.
“The memory of all that” sings Ella Fitgerald. “No they can’t take that away from me.”
Chris Benguhe is a former PEOPLE Magazine Reporter and now a columnist for the Catholic Sun and the author of the recently released Overcoming Life’s 7 Common Tragedies: Opportunities for Discovering God
This article appeared orginally in theCatholic Sun, Phoenix AZ, from which it was adapted.
I mean no harm to Michael Jackson—after all the harm he did to himself he certainly didn’t need my help. But I will do my best to help the millions of people out there who were duped into worshiping him to realize that maybe they would be a lot better off appreciating his talent for what it was – talent – not some sign that he was a savior, a hero, or any kind of role model, and instead focusing their love elsewhere like on their families, their friends and their God.
In my former life, as a tabloid reporter and celebrity editor, I spent way too much time talking about, writing about and worrying about what Jacko did or didn’t do, covering both of his molestation cases not to mention a litany of his other absurd adventures from gratuitous plastic surgery to deviant hobbies like collecting body parts of circus freaks to dangling his child from a hotel balcony.
All of it had one thing in common – it was self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and self-sabotaging behavior that did nothing to capitalize on his fame and fortune to make the world a better place, but in fact had exactly the opposite effect.
This was a man who could have truly made an extraordinary difference in the world, if only he realized that he was not above the rest of us. That he didn’t have the right to be “insane” and to waste his time, money, resources and his life allowing himself to go insane in public.
You see what makes us non famous people so lucky is that we don’t get that same pass. We must be accountable to others, like our bosses, like our friends, like mainstream society. That not only keeps us in line, but it keeps us contributing to society to the best of our ability.
But unfortunately we allow stars to do, say, act or self-destruct in whatever way they want, almost regardless of the cost to society, and why – because they are fun to watch, or because they have some special talent?
Well, whoop-tee-do! The bottom line is that the rest of the world needs us all to tow the line, to do our best to respect humanity- others’ as well as our own. And when we don’t, we are not respecting others, and we are leading others away from their own self-worth, from their own ability to love and respect themselves and down a self-destructive path that makes the world worse not better.
So to any of those supposed cultural and civic leaders out there right now calling Michael a hero (one of these misguided fools even claimed Michael sacrificed his life for us) ask yourself this question – who did Michael save by throwing away his life the way he did – nobody.
His “sacrifice” was nothing more than a self-obsessed series of snafus which didn’t do anyone in his family or the rest of the world any good.
Except for this – maybe every time another crazy star dies before his or her time, it exposes them and their lifestyle for what it really is and makes the rest us thankful that we get to live a more accountable life.
By the time you read this, the New Year will have already begun, which means it’s time to start fresh with a new attitude and a new plan.
With just about every single pundit telling you how bad things are, how about a quick look at what didn’t go wrong?
Well, first we dodged a few bullets this hurricane season. Though we saw the fourth most active hurricane season on record, the United States escaped with far less damage and deaths than could have been, say for instance if Hurricane Ike had made landfall as a Category 4 storm instead of a Category 2.
And knock on wood, we still have not suffered another terror attack on U.S. soil since 2001. Regardless of what you think about our government or the current administration, somebody was working pretty hard to protect us. All those individuals deserve a hand, and thank God for them.
Speaking of keeping us safe, the crime rate went down last year in the United States. Last September, the FBI’s Crime in the United States report showed a decline in crimes in almost every category.
On the health care front, the rates of almost every disease have dropped dramatically in America over the last several decades, according to a report released in June 2008.
The American Heart Association reported coronary heart disease and stroke age-adjusted death rates are down by 25.8 percent and 24.4 percent, respectively, in the last decade. In fact, their 2010 strategic goal for reducing deaths from coronary heart disease has already been achieved.
Last year, the American Cancer Society informed us that the death rate from lung, colorectal, prostate, breast and other cancer types all fell. The cancer death rate for men has fallen by 18.4 percent since 1990 and for women has fallen by 10.5 percent since 1991.
Yes, cancer is still the second leading cause of death in the United States, right behind heart disease, so we all need to keep working on both of these societal issues. But those figures aren’t flukes; they are the result of a lot of hard work by dedicated Americans in the health care fields, the scientific community, in academia and government as well as everyday Americans trying harder to take care of themselves so they can live longer, more fruitful and productive lives for their loved ones, for society and for themselves.
None of that is accidental either. We care about our children, and it shows. They care too about living a better life. Do we have more work to do letting our children know about the value and the importance of their lives? You betcha! But things are getting better, not worse.
Ultimately, what did go really wrong this year came down to money — the way people use it, and how a bunch of it disappeared from our bank accounts. For many of us it was downright disheartening. For others it was truly a catastrophe.
This is a time for those of us who can still pay the bills to realize we have been spared this year from so many other catastrophes, that maybe we should be pretty grateful, and maybe we should reach out a little bit more to help because of that.
