Characters
Johnny is an example of a truly valiant person. He is selfless in his hope that he will not cause too much pain for others. In Johnny's last few weeks on earth, he still hungers for knowledge. He does not give up because of his illness. He still has hopes and dreams intact.
His parents are also notable for the remarkable degree of communication and care they managed to share with each other and their son when his diagnosis was confirmed, and on to the end of his life. Although by the time of his diagnosis they had divorced and were living separately, they transcended distance, time, and whatever history had led them to separate in order to discuss carefully and kindly the options, care, and ongoing prognosis for his life.
Frances Gunther, his mother, takes care to have conversations with him about the ultimate issues of life and suffering as addressed in many cultures worldwide, making spiritual writings accessible to him and impressing on him the value of his thoughts and the effect of his actions on others.
Johnny's character is inspirational to not only his parents, but his caregivers as well, who employ sometimes radical treatments to try and save his life. Among them are Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield and Dr. Max Gerson, whose Gerson diet was used.
Wilder Penfield wrote a letter to his family after his death saying, "for such there must be an immortality which we who tinker at the body may guess at but not understand."
Read more about this topic: Death Be Not Proud (book)
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“The Nature of Familiar Letters, written, as it were, to the Moment, while the Heart is agitated by Hopes and Fears, on Events undecided, must plead an Excuse for the Bulk of a Collection of this Kind. Mere Facts and Characters might be comprised in a much smaller Compass: But, would they be equally interesting?”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
“Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—
which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
—Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
“I make it a kind of pious rule to go to every funeral to which I am invited, both as I wish to pay a proper respect to the dead, unless their characters have been bad, and as I would wish to have the funeral of my own near relations or of myself well attended.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)