Gosh, this is a tough one. Surely, there must be so many selfless acts, but most of which I’ve probably subconsciously chosen to forget.

Let’s see. At the urging (nay insistence) (nay threat) of another I had a vasectomy. Does that count?

As I look back over my life, which this question forces me to do, I can recall other instances that at first glance might be viewed as selfless, although perhaps only in the sense that I was not thinking about myself. For example:

– When I was a morning paper boy there were three houses on my route where instead of just throwing the paper in the yard or on the porch I personally placed the paper inside the screen door because I knew the residents were elderly. Coincidentally they were also my biggest tippers.

– In high school I befriended the number one nerd in my class (he got two more votes than me) and helped him with his homework (something that was prevalent back in the day) virtually every school night. 

– I took a girl to the senior prom because no one else had ask her (nor did anyone else ask me). 

– While in college I donated blood to the Red Cross for its Vietnam War blood drive, recognizing that was a far safer way to honor our country than bleeding from enemy gunshot in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

– I allowed a law school classmate to use my car in DC while I visited Scranton for a month, a regretful decision since he managed to rack up fourteen parking tickets (which I later learned about after being pulled over by a DC cop and directed to follow him to the Third Precinct station to resolve the matter). 

– I volunteered to go down to DC Superior Court with police escort the first night of the riots after Martin Luthor King’s death to assist the court in the all night arraignment process by representing and entering a plea (not guilty, of course) for one of the arrested looters, which allowed me to boast insufferably to my law school peers about my first day in court. 

– I invited another law school classmate to room with me in my first apartment and split the rent of $127 per month, and when he accepted but didn’t have or could afford a bed I gave him my mattress while I slept on the box spring for a year and a half. 

I think, though, that those instances probably reflect acts of helpfulness on my part, and not necessarily selflessness. In retrospect there is so much more I would’ve, could’ve, should’ve done to give of myself. For example, I never worked in a food pantry, or distributed the body and blood of Our Lord to hospital patients. I never became a mentor of little boys by being a Scoutmaster. I never entertained the thought of being a Meals on Wheels driver. I never taught Latin to my sons. I never shared my skills with Habitat for Humanity. I never campaigned for protection of our Second Amendment rights. I never attended an Arthur Murray dancing class. And arguably worse of all, I never sung publicly.

I hope to be eulogized as a generous and kind man. I think those adjectives are convincingly fact-based. But selfless? I’m not so sure that fits. The Oxford dictionary definition of selfless is “concerned more with the needs and wishes of others than one’s own”. I think inherent in that meaning is an element of self-denial. So here’s my problem – I don’t believe that in any good act I’ve done I’ve ever denied myself anything. For me then, in trying to recall when I’ve been selfless, I take more comfort in stating that the opposite does not define me, because throughout my life I’ve tried never to be selfish.

So, as my wife often said to me, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

As I review what I’ve just written, however, and the time it has taken me to compose this story, which has denied me leisure time, I do think that this response qualifies as totally selfless.