The media lionization of John Stanford, curiously, got even worse as time went on in the week after his death. It culminated in four TV stations carrying live broadcasts of the memorial service at (Seafirst) Hec Ed Pavilion, and a breathtakingly fawning six-page special section heralding Stanford in the Dec. 3 Seattle Times. A child at my partner's school asked if Stanford was like Martin Luther King. Not hardly.

First, this is a guy who, less than a year ago and only two years into his tenure as Seattle school head, was whining that he couldn't make ends meet on his $200,000 a year salary, and wasn't all that dedicated to the field of education anyway and would rather be running a company somewhere. Now he's eulogized as selflessly devoted to the kids. This is an absolute insult to the women and men who, for far less pay, have spent 10, 20, 30 or more years of their lives in the classrooms and corridors every day, selflessly giving their professional lives to the futures of our children.

Second: about Stanford's "heroism." This seems to stem mostly from his status as a survivor, for a few months, of a debilitating disease. Not to burst any bubbles, but I speak as someone who, four years ago, had a double organ transplant. I've also had one (maybe two) strokes since then and innumerable other complications. I have, so far, survived a terminal diagnosis I first got in 1991. And in my experience there is nothing heroic about being the victim of illness. It's simply miserable. You can choose to get up in the morning, or not; keep being who you are, or give up. It's really not much of a choice: most of us choose to keep going. Too much of the celebration of John Stanford celebrated not who he was, but what his disease process was, and that, in the face of it, he made the obvious choices. That's unfair to him, and to all of us who face similar struggles. Neither survival nor death are particularly heroic.

Every day, people who once led accomplished professional lives die in the Seattle area. Many of them die, as Stanford did at age 60, earlier than one would hope. Few of them get special sections in the region's largest newspaper. (Of course, those of us who never made 100K or more per year are shit out of luck.)

John Stanford will be with us for a lot longer in death than he was in life during his brief tenure in Seattle. It would be nice if he could be remembered for what he was: a military man who, in his final years, went on to a second career as an arrogant public official with a gift for seducing the media and sucking up to corporate allies, even in jobs (like running a school district) he knew nothing about. And then he got sick, and he died. It's the stuff of life; no more nor less heroic than thousands of other lives in our city.