Courage

When I tell you about my latest act of courage, you’ll probably scratch your heads and say, “he found that hard to do?” But if you consider some of the things for which I’ve had to screw up my courage, you’ll see that this current bit of bravery is entirely consistent with what I've found found hard to do in the past.

In an earlier post, I wrote about breaking the leg of a schoolmate. I was in the fourth grade, new to the school, and, during recess, I sat on a hill and watched a softball game below. It was a stupid thing to do, but I did it anyway: I kicked a stone, which rolled down the hill and broke the leg of the batter. My mother forced me to call up that boy and apologize. This was the first test of courage that I can recall. “Just wait until I get out,” the boy said, “I’ll get you then.” It would please me to report that I said, “Just try and I’ll break your other leg,” but if I found apologizing to him hard, I would have found threatening him even harder.

When I was competing for a position on our college newspaper, I was assigned to interview, during his visit to our university, the president of Keio University, the oldest institute of higher learning in Japan. I was ushered into the office of our university president, where an ancient man sat behind a large desk. The splendor of the office and the distinction of the visitor awed me almost to the point of catatonia. Nonetheless, I managed to stammer some inane questions, which the old man courteously answered. Had I had my wits about me I would have asked him about the effects of the recently concluded war on his university (for my generation, “the war” refers to the second world war), but that I managed to ask him anything at all served as a minor triumph of bravery.

After I earned my Ph.D. I screwed up my courage to call my dissertation advisor by his first name. He was only five years older than I was, but I held him in such awe that it was hard for me to do. It was almost as hard as if I had tried to address Queen Elizabeth as “Liz” or the pope by his first name.

At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, instructors from abroad are expected to lecture in Hebrew after the first three years of their appointment. Giving my first lecture in Hebrew required great courage since a generous estimate of my vocabulary then was about 2,500 words. I had rehearsed my lecture with a teacher and had penciled in her numerous corrections, but even so, the sweat rolled down my cheeks as I delivered my talk. As I spoke, I felt as if I had jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and was trying to fly towards the Manhattan Bridge by waving my arms in the air as hard as I could. While you might think it was hard for the students to listen to me struggle, the truth is that they preferred to hear execrable Hebrew than beautiful English. Even so, that first lecture in Hebrew was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

After several years of working with a doctoral student, it became clear to me that I had made a mistake in accepting her as a candidate. She would never earn her doctorate unless I wrote her dissertation myself. I had put off informing her of my decision as long as I could, but finally I managed to tell her that I was no longer willing to work with her. She was wasting her time and mine. This was hard for me to do because I knew it would be a devastating blow to her, and I didn't want to hurt her. It did hurt her and I felt terrible. Even now I wonder if I should have let her continue, even though I knew it would be in vain.

With this as background, I will tell you my latest act of courage: I called a doctor’s office to ask for an appointment. I’ve had many operations over the years and not once did I even ask for a second opinion about the course of treatment. But now that I’m faced with a disease that cannot be cured, only slowed down, I wanted to put myself under the care of a doctor at Memorial Sloan Kettering who specializes in my problem – prostate cancer’s metastasis to the bone. That meant leaving the urologist who had supervised my treatment for prostate cancer since 2007, a man recommended by my primary care doctor, whom I greatly respect. Why did I find it so hard to call the oncologist? Because I was afraid of hurting my urologist’s feelings. I knew this was ridiculous, but even so I probably would not have called him had not his father, an old friend, urged me to put myself under his son's care. I knew he was right, and I did what he advised me to do. Nonetheless I found the task difficult.

This list of brave acts is not very impressive, I admit. None of them, after all, was like landing on Guadalcanal Beach. None of them required me to do more than to speak. Still, from the sixth grade on, saying what I felt to be the right thing has sometimes been the hardest thing for me to do. Miss March, the principal of my primary school, was right when she said at our final assembly, “boys and girls, the way you are now is the way you’ll always be.” The boy was indeed the father of the man. And that man had to screw up his courage simply to call the office of a specialist who is superbly qualified to care for him. Go figure. But I did it.