Now I understand

If you pay close attention to professional athletes, you're likely to see them visiting, making friends with and serving children with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses. The cynic would watch the video of the athlete in the hospital or home of the child and surmise that it's good public relations to show that you're giving back. (That term and concept make little sense to me, and that's another topic for another breakfast.)

This skeptic is now a believer that these athletes and celebrities are getting much more than they're giving. Here's how I know. I just returned from serving children with cancer and their siblings at Camp Merry Times, the annual summer camp experience held each May (when the physical camp is available) at Camp Ton-A-Wandah near Flat Rock, North Carolina. Once a year, parents get a 72-hour respite from caring for these children for whom illness is far too familiar and medical attention focuses most on managing the illness. Likewise with the siblings of these children who are often starved for attention with all eyes and ears on the sick child.

Spend some time in a challenging and fun setting with a child who is in some stage of cancer and cancer treatment and you'll see what I mean. Once a child has faced the possibility of death before reaching double digits in age, he or she tends to be ready to face and handle just about anything in terms of adventure and challenge. Take one young man whom I'll call Ben to protect his privacy. Ben has suffered from cancerous brain tumors and a resulting stroke. He is physically unable to smile after the effects of the stroke, so when he pauses to smile for a photo, his mouth has an unbalanced shape to it. Ben also ranks high on the manners scale (yes sir and yes ma'am at all times) and doesn't budge the fear needle (he's first on the high ropes course and the zip line across the lake).

Then there's the young lady we'll call Christina. She had to leave camp one morning to get a spinal tap and a chemo treatment. I've heard those are painful and nauseating, respectively, and I'm grateful that I've experienced neither one. Christina completed the spinal tap, headed straight into her chemo treatment and stepped out saying she was ready to get moving to lunch because she had to get back to camp.

Here's my point about the pro athlete and Ben or Christina: while the media and others would idolize the athlete and call him or her a hero, the athlete who befriends Ben and others like him learns quickly who the real heroes are. The heroes are the children who face death eye to eye and treat every moment of life as the precious gem that it is. They go about their day with the attitude of taking things in stride, enduring the pain and discomfort of illness, treatment and medicine and remaining mostly bright and cheery through it all.

These children are indeed heroes, along with the 70 or so counselors who give up a long weekend, many taking personal vacation days from their places of employment. They arrive Wednesday for orientation, welcome campers Thursday and provide unconditional, one-on-one, loving attention to these children through Sunday lunch. When they hand them back safe and sound to the children's parents, campers are revved up to tell anyone who will listen about their exploits in the canoe, on horseback and in the relay races. Counselors head home in that exhausted but happy state, knowing that they've made a difference in the lives of children who will treasure the memories for, well, as long as they live.

Some children return year after year to enjoy the generous help of everyone from the camp's organizers, Friends of Santa Claus of North Carolina, and the medical staff that makes sure children are safe, properly medicated and tended to at a moment's notice with the slightest hint of a bruise or minor cut. Other children, such as Harriet (again, not her real name) survive only a month or two beyond their camp experience. Their names are inscribed on a special brick and placed on the open-air chapel's entrance walk among the nearly 50 campers and nine counselors who have passed in the 18 years since Camp Merry Times began.

I'm honored to serve as board chair for Camp Rise Above (http://www.campriseabove.org/) whose executive director is the co-founder of Friends of Santa Claus and Camp Merry Times, Barbara Denton. She and her late husband Ted Van Thullenar created a legacy that will last as long as the Western North Carolina mountains where these children have run and jumped, smiled and swam to their hearts' content. Barbara is now focused on serving children with life-threatening illness and serious life challenges in her home base of Charleston, South Carolina, where her latest organization aspires to build a camp that will host children all summer long and entire families for getaway weekends through fall, winter and spring.

Yes, now I understand why athletes find and remain friends with these children and those who care for them in special ways. It's because athletes also need heroes, and this is where they find them.