I have read a few terrific books about the nation’s Medal of Honor recipients. Each of their stories is inspiring. But I remain particularly haunted by the story of twenty-three-year-old Henry Erwin, a U.S. Army Air Forces radio operator from Alabama whose heroism during World War II was astounding. On April 12, 1945, Staff Sergeant Erwin was on a B-29 mission to attack a gasoline plant in Koriyama, Japan. One of his tasks was to help the bombers see their aim points by dropping a phosphorus flare through a tube in the floor of the B-29. The device exploded in the tube, and the phosphorus was ignited, blinding Erwin and engulfing him in flames. Smoke filled the airplane. Erwin knew the flare would soon burn through the floor, igniting the bombs in the bomb bay below, destroying the B-29 and probably killing the crew.
Though Erwin was in excruciating pain, he crawled along the floor, found the burning flare, and held it against his chest with his bare hands. He brought it up to the cockpit, screamed to the copilot to open his window, and heaved it out, saving the other eleven men on board.
Erwin was expected to die within days from his injuries, and the decision was made by General Curtis LeMay to award him the Medal of Honor before he succumbed. The problem was, there was no Medal of Honor to be found in the Western Pacific. The closest one was hours away in a glass display case in Honolulu. And so an airman was dispatched in the middle of the night to go pick it up. When he couldn’t find the key to open the display case, he broke the glass. He collected the medal, and put it on a plane bound for Guam, where it was pinned on the still-alive-and-conscious Staff Sergeant Erwin, wrapped head to toe in bandages.
Erwin surprised everyone, living through forty-three operations. He remained hospitalized until 1947, and after he was released, his burns left him scarred and disfigured for life. Yet he continued to serve his country as a counselor at a Veterans Hospital in Alabama. He died in 2002.
Who among us could have brought ourselves to lift that white-hot flare to our chest with our bare hands? Presented with that situation, I assume I would have let it burn through the floor of the B-29.
Knowing that there have been people like Erwin, capable of doing such extraordinary things—acts that are truly beyond comprehension—I feel that the least I can do is be of service in whatever very small ways are available to me.
Sometimes that means recalling how I felt as a thirteen-year-old, when I first heard the story of Kitty Genovese, and made a vow about the kind of person I hoped to be. And sometimes it means attempting the smallest of acts—helping a couple find a lost stroller, or enabling a standby passenger to get the last seat on a departing plane.
10. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE
LORRIE AND I have a favorite hill, and we’re very lucky, because it is within minutes of our house, on a large piece of open land right at the edge of our neighborhood in Danville. We hike up there together to think, to breathe, and to appreciate. It’s a pretty magical place.
Most of the year, everywhere you look on that hill, there are acres of tall native grasses, in every variation of brown and gold. Later in the spring, for a short while, the grass turns green and more lush. Brown or green doesn’t matter to me. I appreciate the beauty there in every season.
On the afternoon of January 11, 2009, Lorrie suggested that we take a walk up that hill. It was a Sunday, and I was scheduled to leave early the following morning for the trip that would end, four days later, with Flight 1549.
We had a lot on our minds that day. Like so many Americans, we were worried about the economy, and how our serious financial issues might be resolved. I continued to be very concerned about the Jiffy Lube franchise that hadn’t renewed its lease on our property, and about our ability to keep up the mortgage payments on it. It was a problem with no easy solution. My focus can narrow when thinking about our personal problems or the economic woes of the airline industry, and Lorrie has a wonderful ability to help me change my perspective.
We were sitting in the kitchen, and Lorrie knew what might help. “Come on,” she said to me, “let’s go for a walk.”
And so we hiked up the fire road that narrows into a trail on that steep, beautiful unnamed hill. We stopped at the top to look into the valley below. It’s a gorgeous panorama of neighborhoods in one direction, and pristine open spaces in the other. The sights from that hill can literally widen your view of the world. Somehow, your troubles get put into perspective. The view restores and renews you.
On that day, Lorrie and I were quiet for a little while, just taking it all in, and then I said to her: “Looking out there makes you feel like anything is possible.”
She smiled at me. She already knew it, without me having to say the words. That’s Lorrie. If you want to discover the benefits of believing that
LORRIE IS an exceptionally strong woman, and as I have watched her grapple with various issues in her life, and the challenges in our own family, I’ve learned a great deal about the power of optimism and acceptance, and about the responsibilities all of us have to carve a path to our own happiness.
She and I are a bit different. I’m a believer in “realistic optimism,” which I consider a leader’s most effective tool. That’s short-term realism combined with long-term optimism. Lorrie understands the value in that, to be sure, but she also sees how embracing full-on optimism about life’s possibilities is good for your health, your relationships, and your sanity.
Lorrie speaks frankly and from the heart, and she’s able to take her life and pull from it moments and experiences that resonate deeply with other women, literally changing their lives. That’s what she does in her career as an outdoors fitness instructor, heading a one-woman operation she calls “Fit and Fabulous…Outdoors!” She takes groups of women on long hikes. They’ll go up one side of a mountain, and by the time Lorrie brings them back down the other side, they aren’t the same women anymore. They’ve seen the world and themselves in a new way. Sometimes I’ll drive the women to the trailhead or back home from it. I’ve waited for Lorrie at the bottom of a mountain when she and the women in her groups have returned. It’s remarkable to watch.
Granted, I’m Lorrie’s husband and I love her, so this may sound overstated. But those who’ve walked up a mountain with her know just what I’m talking about.
One of Lorrie’s friends, Helen Ott, who has joined her on numerous fitness hikes, puts it this way: “Lorrie is like a bright light.” Helen talks about all the fun she has on these walks, because Lorrie is such a good storyteller and is so supportive of other women. “She makes people feel confident in their abilities,” Helen says, “and she makes them feel good about themselves.”
Lorrie’s embrace of exercise—and the idea that it is best done with others, and in the great outdoors—was actually a journey that began very uneasily for her. She speaks openly with women about how she was “the quintessential chubby girl” for most of her childhood. She has worked to understand the impact her dad’s alcoholism had on her eating habits and on her sense of herself growing up. Hers was not a painless childhood, but she isn’t one to make excuses.
Lorrie was overweight as an adult, too, and that was exacerbated by the fertility drugs she took trying to get pregnant. The drugs left her thirty-five pounds heavier, and feeling deeply wounded. Unable to conceive a child, she felt that her body had betrayed her. Even after we adopted Kate and Kelly, and even though we felt our family was complete and perfect, her feelings remained raw.
“I fell madly in love with the girls the moment we brought them home in our arms,” Lorrie has explained to her clients. “Sully and I felt as if we had won the baby lottery. But those feelings of betrayal, they didn’t magically go away. When the infertility ordeal was over, I had two incredibly beautiful daughters that I loved with every fiber of my being, but I was angry at my body.”
A decade ago, just before Lorrie turned forty, she decided that she would try to let go of the anger and make peace with her body. First, she joined a gym. But walking on a treadmill and going nowhere seemed unsatisfying. She was still having what she called “negative conversations” with her body parts. She told me she felt “awkward” at the gym. “The more I focused on my butt, the bigger it seemed to get,” she’d say. Like a lot of people, she was trying to lose weight by beating her body into submission.
The mind-body connection is powerful, of course, and the fact that she didn’t like the body carrying her
