I am a brave man

My name is Bear, and I am a brave man.

I live with a disease.There is a history of it on both sides of my family, so it was all but inevitible that I would develop it one day. It is incurable. It will cause, directly or indirectly my death. Uncontrolled, it will shorten my life by years. It has cost me some usage of my hands, to this point. I struggle with it daily.

My name is Bear, and I am a brave man.

A gunman attacked Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and others on Saturday. 20-year-old intern Daniel Hernandez ran toward the shots to try to save those who were injured. He stopped to check pulses on several victims before finding Giffords, who had been shot in the head. Hernandez applied pressure to the wound, holding his boss of five days until his clothes were soaked with her blood. Hernandez, trained as a nursing assistant, lifted her head so that she wouldn't choke on her own blood. When an ambulance came, he climbed inside with her and held her hand.

My name is Bear, and I am a brave man.

I held my other's hand as she died. I watched as her body shut down. I watched her draw her last breath. I told her goodbye, again, although in truth she had left the shell of her body many hours ago. I straightened her arm and placed her hand back on the bed.

My name is Bear, and I am a brave man.

The longtime minister of 76-year-old Dorwan Stoddard, one of the six victims of Saturday's Arizona shooting, says he had a conversation with Stoddard's wife in the hospital that leads him to believe Stoddard died trying to protect her from the spraying bullets. "According to Mavy when I talked to her in the hospital, when the gunshots went off Dorwan pulled her down and ended up on top of her," Michael Nowak, minister of the Mountain Avenue Church of Christ in Tucson, Ariz., told HuffPost. "She was shot in the legs, and he was shot in the head. She believes in her heart that he protected her from damage."

My name is Bear, and I am no coward.


But I don't know the first thing about being brave.