Call It Courage

Sep 27, 2023
5 min read

The Ones Who Love Us Never Truly Leave Us

When I was in fifth grade, I moved to a new school. My teacher was an absolute stickler for every rule in the book, but she did have a sense of humor and a love of all things Disney. When you did something good, you got "money" which could be used at the end of each semester in her "auctions" where she would "sell" little stuffed animals, books, and her Disney merchandise she had collected over the years. As a self-acclaimed Disney adult myself, you can imagine that I lived for these auctions. So when the first one came around, it was safe to say I was absolutely ecstatic! I wanted this Minnie Mouse tote bag so badly, I had saved up for it all year. I knew my mom and me could share it, and I believed this purchase has very much been worth waiting for. When the time came for her to auction it off, I found myself facing off our class clown: Nick Simard.

While I did ultimately win the tote bag, Nick Simard was still always finding new ways to surprise me. When I was in sixth grade, he single handedly started a class wide dance battle on our outdoor education overnight field trip. My mom was my sixth grade teacher, and she always made sure he was sitting at the front of the classroom where she could keep an eye on him and his shenanigans, and somehow he still always managed to cause a distraction. He was known to make people laugh with his perfect French accent, and although he was never on task, he was still one of the smartest people I knew. One year, he humbly admitted to our class that he had built a computer entirely on his own over the summer. He sat next to me in science for the year so I could "keep an eye on him," and although his test review consisted of trying to read the glossary in Spanish and making us all laugh until our stomachs hurt, he would earn a better score than me every time.

One week near the end of sixth grade, Nick had to go to the hospital after a pool party because of a particularly bad stomach ache. We all wrote him cards, but we didn't think much of his precautionary visit. Surely someone who brought so much light and life into everything he did would be just fine. We were rehearsing for our spring concert when our principal came into the church with tears streaming down her face to deliver the news: Nick Simard had passed away suddenly. He had an undetected birth defect in his intestines, and his body eventually poisoned itself to death. It's been over seven years since that awful day, but I will never forget that feeling of confusion, grief, anger, and disappointment all rolled into one. We all stayed in the church holding each other for what felt like minutes but I later learned was hours. The weeks that followed surrounded us with counselors, teachers, therapists, priests, and Nick's family. To this day, his parents and his older brother are the strongest people I know. They always liked to say "If love could have saved Nick, he would have lived forever."

My mom and sister had also come to know Nick very well, and they were both just as heartbroken as I was. Two years later, my sister came home with his fifth grade copy of this book called Call It Courage. I can say with full confidence that it's one of the most useless books I've ever read, but that didn't matter. My sister knew how much that memento meant to my mom and me, so she went out of her way to get it for us. His sloppy handwriting suddenly meant so much more, and I've found that when we are dealing with loss, it's often the littlest things that matter the most. Nick lived his life to the fullest each and every day, he already knew that the beauty of life was in the silly little details. Like I said earlier, it's been over seven years, and time has been profoundly healing for all of us. But every once in a while, something will remind me of him so acutely that it makes my heart stop for a second.

In my politics class this week, we are talking about Plato's Republic and the implications of what his writings mean for our society today. So the professor of that class (he's utterly hysterical, by the way) gets up in front of the class and starts explaining what our souls are made of: reason, spirit, and desire. He then looks up at our class and goes "you know, spirit! Well, let's call it courage." I was stopped in my tracks, and I was reminded that yesterday would have been Nick's twentieth birthday. Now, I know everyone has a different perspective on religion and the afterlife, but I swear to you that was Nick's way of talking to me. Life has been really hard for me recently on a personal level, and I can't help but feel like this was his way of reminding me that everything will be okay.

Sometimes, I get really sad thinking about all the things Nick missed out on: graduating high school, graduating college, his first true heartbreak, his wedding, his kids who would be so lucky to inherit his sense of humor... it didn't seem fair to rob him of all the happiness he deserved. And yet, life goes on for the rest of us. Death takes and takes and takes, and we keep living anyway. The day he died, I vowed to myself that I would live my life to the fullest because he never got to. Nick lived more life in one day than most of us do in our entire lives. At the end of the day, no one remembers the silly little things he used to get sent to the principal's office for, we remember the moments that made us laugh until we cried and how loved he made us all feel. Nick taught me that you don't have to change the whole world in order to change lives and how important it is to just laugh. Laughter is the best medicine and smiling is contagious, and I think back on how lucky I was to just know Nick for exactly who he was: extraordinary.

Real life is messy and hard and imperfect and exhausting, but remembering Nick reminds me just how worthwhile all of it is. If a twelve year old goofball can change the lives of a whole community, just think of how much good we all can do! The ones who love us never truly leave us, and we are living representations of their goodness and love. Every morning that we wake up is a gift, not a guarantee, and we are the only ones who can make sure we aren't wasting it. The commitment to live life to the fullest everyday just like Nick did will always come from inside us... let's call it courage! ;)