A Different Kind of Hero

My daughter, Julie, called several weeks ago to tell me how sad she was about the sudden death of David Goldberg, the husband of Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg. I sat up, surprised. I'd been thinking about the same thing all week. Julie spoke about imagining the loss of a husband who had so strongly championed his wife's career, had been shouldering fully half of the child care and domestic load and had pulled his weight in a hundred other ways. When I got off the phone with Julie, I remember thinking about Goldberg: "We lost a hero this week." It was a strange thought. I usually associate heroes with war stories, action films and Marvel comics. The hero's the guy with outsized physical powers, the loner who relies entirely on his own judgment to make the tough decisions. He bonds most deeply with others under adverse conditions and is willing to risk danger -- even death -- for people he cares about or causes that he holds sacred (Think Clint Eastwood in In the Line of Fire, or Bradley Cooper in American Sniper). This macho superman is far from the guy Sandberg described at an international conference on masculinities I attended in New York City, two months before her husband's fatal accident. Indeed, David Goldberg was a highly respected entrepreneur in the tech world, the founder of Launch Media and then CEO of Survey Monkey. But for Sheryl, his greatest strength lay in his ability to support and nurture others -- not just her but also the many women who worked for ...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news