My VIP for this week is Sir Patrick Stewart, a remarkable actor who starred in productions such as “Star Trek,” “X-Men,” and others for nearly 40 years. According to Samuel J. Abrams in an article published in the Deseret News, Stewart spoke “openly about his difficult childhood, his father’s violence at home, and the many struggles that shaped him.” Abrams shared the following thoughts about Stewart.
Stewart’s character showed that he respected
knowledge, valued competence and understood that leadership required judgment
rather than popularity, and this hit me right at a time when I was figuring out
what type of person I was hoping to become. But for me, and I suspect for countless other men of my Gen X generation, Patrick Stewart will always be Captain Jean-Luc Picard
from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
Tributes,
stories and memories are already pouring in on social media and, for me, what
makes his death particularly difficult is that his character – Picard – gave me
something important twice in my life, separated by more than 30 years.
What Patrick Stewart taught a young boy
The
first gift came when I was a boy, and it involved his performance in “Star
Trek: The Next Generation,” where he served as the show’s protagonist as
captain of the USS Enterprise. The show premiered in 1987, when I was very much
looking up to older men for examples of how to live life, and Picard was an
extraordinary figure to encounter at that age.
Stewart’s
character was intelligent, disciplined, thoughtful and principled, and the many
episodes – which were drawn from the Western literary canon – illustrated just
how much Picard believed in duty, obligation and the responsibilities that came
with authority. If one watches even a handful of episodes in the series from
any of its many seasons, it’s hard to miss that Picard understood that
commanding a starship meant being responsible for hundreds of lives and that
his decisions carried enormous consequences….
So,
for a young man trying to understand adulthood, that was an incredible set of
values and virtues. Patrick Stewart certainly never knew me, but his character
helped shape the man I wanted to become.
The
original “Star Trek: The Next Generation” series ended in 1994, and I grew
older, went to college, became a professor and was blessed to have my own
family. Picard remained a figure I admired and inspired a significant amount of
my thinking, but the character now belonged largely to an earlier chapter of my
life.
Patrick Stewart’s influence carried over into
fatherhood
Then,
in 2020, my relationship with Picard changed dramatically when Stewart returned
to the role in “Star Trek: Picard.” This was a short three-season series, and I
was a father at that point, and the timing could hardly have been better. The
same actor portraying the same character in name, but now older and changed by
life, who once taught me something about duty and leadership when I was young,
was suddenly confronting questions about family, regret and love, and Picard
taught me more lessons. The final season revealed that Picard had a son, Jack
Crusher, whom he had never known.
And
I – along with the rest of the world – was experiencing and learning from a
very different version of Picard. We were now watching a celebrated character
who was appreciably older, more vulnerable and increasingly aware of what he
had missed earlier. The world and I had the chance to see a real growth and
change in a beloved character who had spent so much of his life keeping people
at a distance and was discovering that there were obligations and attachments
beyond his role as a captain of a spaceship.
Then
came the series finale, which was just devastatingly beautiful and gave so many
of us another critical lesson about life. Jack had been assimilated by the
Borg, another antagonistic cybernetic race whick once robbed Picard himself of
his humanity. Picard enters the Borg ship – known as “the cube” – to rescue his
son, but Jack refuses to leave. Jack believes that he belongs there, connected
to the collective, and cannot imagine returning to an existence in which he
feels alone.
Here,
we quickly see that Picard cannot command his son to come home, nor can he
reason his way out of the situation or rely on the authority that served him so
well aboard the Enterprise. So instead, he tells Jack that he is the part of
himself he never knew was missing. When Jack refuses to leave, Picard makes a
decision that brings tears to my eyes whenever I watch this scene: He embraces
his son and tells him, “Then, if you won’t leave, I’ll stay with you. Till the
end. You have changed my life. Forever.”
Picard’s
decision and words are the second gift. Here was the man who had taught me
about duty, sacrifice and leadership when I was a boy, and now, when I am a
father, he is teaching me something about fatherhood. His son needed him, and
nothing else mattered, and Picard was willing to die rather than leave his
child alone. We saw unconditional love, expressed by a man who had spent much
of his life struggling to show it.
I
have my own children now, and I regularly pause and like to think about what it
means to be a good father. There are obligations to meet, examples to set and
countless decisions to make, and I know that some will be wrong even with the best
of intentions. But beneath all of that is something far simpler – our children
need to know that we will be there for them, whatever happens….
Picard,
as played by the brilliant Stewart, helped make me the man and father I am
today…. Thank you, Sir Patrick. For both gifts.
