A glimpse of the rare

He died on Jackie Robinson Day in the major leagues, and maybe that was as right as this sort of thing can ever be. Not that there actually is anything right about a man dying of colon cancer at the age of 43, of course.

But there is a certain symmetry to it, baseball celebrating Jackie Robinson on the same day the man who brought Jackie Robinson to life on the big screen departed his own. "42" was the film that put Chadwick Boseman in front of us, and then he went on to portray James Brown and Thurgood Marshall and of course King T'Challa in "Black Panther" and a handful of other films in the Marvel franchise.

He was a star. His talent, his gift, was going to make him an even bigger star. And so we are entitled to feel not just sad but a little cheated this morning, as selfish as the latter clearly is.

Boseman is the one who really got cheated, after all. But in the process of being cheated, he left us with a glimpse of something exceedingly rare in America in this age of lunatics and charlatans.

He showed us dignity. Imagine that.

The flat-footed shock blowing through social media at the news of Boseman's death, see, happened because Boseman kept his illness to himself. He was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer in 2016, and he never said a word. Underwent chemo and several surgeries and all the while kept making movies, including Black Panther and the Thurgood Marshall film and three Avengers films and the Spike Lee Netflix film Da 5 Bloods.

I have no idea how he managed to do all that. I have no idea how anyone could.

But he did, and while he was at it, he helped raise $4 million for protective equipment for Black communities hit hard by the Bastard Plague. And never once used his personal illness as some sort of hey-look-I'm-sick-too attempt to divert the focus from the crisis at hand.

He could have, of course. He could have gone public with his own struggle and made the talk-show rounds and inevitably made it about him instead of a nation being overtaken by a pandemic. But like the man he portrayed in "42," he kept his mouth shut.

Such a rare thing in a country infested with so many folks who can't keep their own mouths shut. Even when they demonstrably should.

You lead by example, everyone says, and right now we're being led by some exceedingly bad ones. Many of those were on display this week. On the national stage, we saw acts celebrated which should never be celebrated; saw people held up as icons of American life who are anything but; saw dignity conferred on that which cannot and should never be dignified.

And then Chadwick Boseman dies without uttering a peep for four years as he fought for his life. And that is so breathtaking and astonishing and, yes, dignified, it's as if we rummaged through this nation of fakes and discovered the Hope Diamond glittering in their midst.

And, lord, did Chadwick Boseman glitter. Does glitter. Will.