Frank H. Nelson of CincinnatiHerrick, Warren Crocker
Religion
Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati
Herrick, Warren Crocker
Nelson, Frank Howard, 1869-1939
And then her courage. There are the lesser courages and the
greater. There are many who dare face danger and undertake hard
tasks, and face ridicule and failure. It is a fine and a true
courage and I do not underrate it. Helen Trounstine had it and
had it to the full. She tackled hard tasks; she faced some men
whose interests she opposed. She fought out her fights against
all comers, and never flinched. She would go into the court or
into the saloon or dance hall, the places of commercial
recreation, and fight her fight with all, for what she believed
to be right; and she won most of the time. It was a noble thing
to see that delicate woman unafraid before the problems and evils
of the world.
Yet that was not the finest courage she had. That other finer
courage is the one that I would emphasize. It was given her to
reconcile a spirit filled with high ideals and great desires,
with a body weak, often bent and torn with pain, unsuited to the
tasks she longed to do, until at last she was stricken with utter
helplessness waiting for the end. For only a few brief years was
her body adequate, even a little, to her will. And instead of
bending before that limitation and saying that she could do
nothing because of it, instead of growing bitter with resentment
at a fate that had so burdened her, she but grappled with it the
more determinedly. With utter courage of heart and mind, she
fought her inner fight and won the victory of cheer and energy
and peace. With no excuse and no complaints, and no relaxing of
her will before the limitations of her strength, she lived and
loved and served as if she had the health she longed for. The
limitations of her stricken body meant the giving up of many dear
desires, of hopes that would have made life sweet and joyous, of
work she yearned to undertake.
Any of you who have had much to do with one stricken with a sore
disease, who knows he never can be well again, know that it is
not the sickness, the physical weakness and pain that make the
problem and the tragedy. It is the reconciling of the will to
surrender life's hopes and the readjustment of the life to the
conditions that have got to be, that nothing can change. That was
Helen Trounstine's problem and her tragedy. She sat down with her
fate and fought that fight and won it. It must have meant many
hours of untold darkness and suffering and bitter questioning and
struggle. But of such hours she gave us no outward sign. At least
I saw none in the years I knew her, except that finest one of
all, the victory of her soul in the glad and joyous doing of what
remained within her power.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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