The town that called Edith a hero had, meaning no harm at all, taken her personhood in exchange, turned a woman who did one extraordinary thing on one afternoon into a permanent symbol, a story that belonged to everyone but her.

They thought they were praising her.

They were, in a way, consuming her.

She had spent forty years hiding not because she was ashamed of what she’d done — she was proud of it, she’d have done it again — but from what other people did with it, from being made a monument while she was still alive and still needed, more than anything, to just be a person.

There is a lesson in that about how we treat the brave and the wounded both: that the kindest thing you can often do for someone who has been through something enormous is to let them, when they want it, be small again.