hero

A special six-page lift-out from the big paper is still spread on the island bench in my kitchen. A six-page obituary, a six-page eulogy run the day after the death. No king or statesman or prime minister died. Jim Stynes is a retired footballer, a social worker, but his dying last Tuesday is known to all Melburnians within an hour thanks to social media.

I hear the news at a supermarket check-out counter. We all know it’s coming—cancer—but still I am deeply saddened, as a whole community seems to be. The government offers a state funeral. Some twitterers ask why a sportsperson or social worker deserves a state funeral. There were better footballers, hundreds of deserving social workers. The Thomases are a tiny minority.

This death is like no other; so public—the cancer diagnosed in 2009; the man so stoic in the face of it; non-football people as moved as the diehards.

This man is like no other; a saint, according to one benediction. He has no detractors, no skeletons in his cupboard; only one radio narcissist utters a bad word.

The most common epithet is hero.

Is the man a hero? I ask if anyone is a hero. Author John Marsden avers that we should not have heroes, people we put on pedestals, believing they can do no wrong. No one is perfect, he says, and heroes always disappoint us when they fall from grace, mere mortals.

Jim Stynes, it seems, defies gravity.

     

Four years before his football club retired him from the game, he begins camps for adolescents who’ve lost their way, just as he did during adolescence. He went to a camp on his native Irish coast where a mentor challenged him to put a value on his life. He does that.

I don’t think Jim Stynes ever set out to be a hero to others. He set out from that camp on the coast to be a hero to himself, and only to himself, to prove that he could make something of himself. He does that. And in doing it he becomes a hero to so many.

Should he be? The journalist Martin Flanagan ends his piece on Jim Stynes with the line: “Your story’s bigger than you, Jimmy, but that was always going to happen.”

The man put a value on his life, a life that is a priceless example of how one might live.

   

Rock on.