Who are your heroes and why? What are the criteria for heroism, and how high is the threshold? What values do your heroes hold, and what influenced them to become who they are? Are they entertainers or athletes, scholars or explorers, researchers or practitioners, leaders or followers, or literary figures leaping from the page, carrying your mind into another realm?

Who are your hero’s heroes? What lofty example inspired and sustained their vision and efforts, making them worthy of adulation? Do they credit their influences?

Please allow me to introduce three of mine for your consideration.

One is my younger sister, Kay. Always a good and sweet girl, she married a man who then abandoned her. She raised two sons for years with no support. Living in my basement once when she was broke and had hard choices to make, she met and later married Terry, a fine and decent man with three children of his own, also a hero.
Several years after, on a Halloween night, she phoned, telling me her youngest son, Ryan, 15, had been killed in an accident.
Rushing to their home, I found her comforting the four other boys who had survived unscathed. She never blamed anyone or questioned the fairness of what happened. She was so concerned for everyone else that she buried her own sorrow. She was a paragon of selfless love hiding a broken, crushed heart.
The cruelest irony was that Ryan had been celebrating with his friends that night before his scheduled departure to go live with his father in Michigan. After the funeral, although he had paid no child support, Ryan’s father was given 50 percent of the death benefit from the insurance company. She never complained.

Kay calls Jesus her hero and follows His example. People may roll their eyes and dismiss the mention of that name or worse, but I hold my sister’s hero as my own. She emulates whom she admires and reveres.

In May 2012, Terry and Kay left for a two-year mission in Tahiti for the LDS (Mormon) church. On Aug. 6, our father died, and seven days later our mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. On Oct. 24, Terry’s father died. Accepting the possibility this would occur, they had visited the parents before their departure, saying their final goodbyes, knowing they would not return for the funerals if any (or all) of the four parents passed away.

They are the kindest, most generous, hard-working people I know, and I feel honored to be associated with them in any way. They inspire me to elevate and improve myself and adopt a gentler demeanor and a more compassionate acceptance of others, just as Jesus, our hero, would.

I am not ashamed or embarrassed to honor Terry, Kay or Christ.

They may not command adulation from the majority of the world, but they certainly have mine.

Heroes they are.