Hero can’t see light he shines on others
Published: September 25, 2004
Darien Richardson was on her way home from work. She’s raising her grandsons and soon they would be home from school. It was 2 p.m. when she got off Loop 101 at 27th Avenue. God’s Unchanging Hand was playing on the radio. It’s the last thing she remembers.
Michael Duffy was on his way to a job interview, hoping this might be his chance to start over. He had lost his job in the past year and just about everything else a man can lose. It was just past 2 when he came off the 101 and saw the dust.
They were strangers and they still haven’t formally met. But he saved her life that August afternoon, and in a way, she saved his.
It’s the sort of story you know exists yet rarely hear. The sort of story where it would be tempting to throw out the word “hero.” But the good news is that Michael Duffy is no hero. He’s just a guy who did the right thing, a man who, at the lowest point in his life, did what had to be done despite the cost.
“He touched my life that day,” Darien told me. “Some people come into your life and you never forget. Even though I don’t remember the man, I remember his face.”
No doubt it was an anguished face, had she been able to see it clearly. Duffy is 50, a man who once had a wife and a young son, a house in Scottsdale, a business trading in exotic cars. But the business never recovered after 9/11, and a year ago Duffy went bankrupt. Since then, he has been hammered into the ground. His marriage broke up, and the bank foreclosed on his house. He lost his truck, too, after an accident left him with fractured vertebrae.
These days, he lives with his older son, trying to struggle to his feet. It’s hard to get up when you walk with a cane, though, and harder still to get a job.
On Aug. 20, he was on his way to an interview when he saw the dust. A Land Cruiser had slammed into Darien’s Kia. When Duffy arrived, people were standing around, thumbing their cellphones. Duffy crawled into the overturned car and found Darien, hanging upside down. Bleeding, panicking, struggling to breathe.
“She was screaming, ‘I’m going to die,’ ” he said. “I told her, ‘No, I’m here. I won’t let that happen.’ ”
Duffy got her out of the seat belt and laid her head on his chest, stroking her blood-soaked hair as they waited for help.
“I remember the gentle strength,” she said, “and someone holding me.”
Darien and her husband, Alan, believe she would have died that day had it not been for Duffy. She has asthma and emphysema. Alan tracked Duffy down and then told the story to someone at a Dillard’s. The store replaced Duffy’s suit.
What Alan didn’t know until later was that Duffy couldn’t have replaced the suit himself. That Duffy had missed his interview that day and his opportunity. The company didn’t believe his story and told him his services would not be needed.
What Alan didn’t know, and maybe still doesn’t know, was what his gratitude has meant to a man at the bottom of a hole.
“He calls me a couple of times a week,” Duffy said. “I keep those messages, and when I’m low I play them back. It says, ‘You know, you’ve got value,’ and I need that. I truly believe my life was as much saved that day as Mrs. Richardson’s.”
Alan called me, marveling at what this stranger had done. “He stepped up,” he said. “He didn’t even hesitate.”
Duffy had to be coaxed into talking. It was no big deal, he said. “In my mind, I did the only thing that could have been done.”
Which, of course, is exactly the point. But then, I guess when you’re living in a dark place, you can’t see the light.
Even if it is coming from you.
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