Show us the victory, and make it pretty.
A proud Olympic moment for Canada as the Dufour-Lapointe sisters won gold and silver in the 2014 moguls event, and a third sister placed twelfth. And as a proud Canadian I watched the replay of their winning event, watched the podium moment, saw the CBC interview and got a warm fuzzy feeling as the parents shared the pride of this moment. What I did not want was to join them for the 6am training sessions (I couldn’t even get up for the live 4am event), the years of discipline and endless weekend sporting events with soggy sandwiches and coffee on the road tracking their daughters. Who are the real heroes? Only two medal winners will be remembered, and in that moment all the training will have paid off.
Sometimes I am asked to share my story of grief, people want to know the highlight moments, to be inspired by stories of success … without the personal hard work that takes place. We want to share the podium, feel the pride, avoid the pain …
Hmm, if I could hand out a medal … years ago when I worked as an operating room nurse, a late-thirties mother brought her teen aged son in for dental work. Dental work, a cleaning and a filling or two should have been a mundane event … but her son was autistic, he did not understand or want to cooperate. The amount of effort extended to get him to the point of sedation … was similar to the luge event, run alongside, strap the boy to the sled, knock him out and run with it. Utter exhaustion exuded from her eyes, she deserved the medal, she has been one of my unsung heroes. That day, I defied our privacy policy, I took her name and address down, and after work I delivered flowers to her house. In all my years of nursing I had never done that … but that was one of those gold medal moments … she had put in the training the dedication, she deserved the medal, all I could do was provide the bouquet.