The next time your body aches, or you don't like what you look like, or you are lonely and feel there is no hope on the horizon —pause, and think of Mr. Joseph Merrick. For most of his life in nineteenth-century England he had no one who cared for him. Sadly, he lost the one person who had loved him without flinching: his mother. He carried her portrait with him for the rest of his short life. After that, there was the workhouse, the crowds that paid to stare, the managers who used him and then abandoned him, the long nights when the only kindness he knew was darkness. For years he had no one who would wait for him to come home, no one who would have mourned if he had simply vanished. And still he did not harden. He kept a gentle heart. He kept a childlike sense of wonder. When a woman—almost a stranger—finally smiled at him and took his hand, he could not speak. He wept as if the world had cracked open. It was the first time anyone but his mother had offered him that ordinary grace. He made tiny cardboard churches with the one hand that still obeyed him, and gave them away like blessings. He treasured a signed photograph from the Princess of Wales who visited him and was kind to him. He often signed his letters with these lines: ’Tis true my form is something odd, but blaming me is blaming God. Could I create myself anew, I would not fail in pleasing you. And then: I would be measured by the soul; the mind’s the standard of the man. In his last years the London Hospital became a kind of home. Dr. Treves came every day—not only as a physician, but as a friend. Flowers, books, pictures, and small gifts filled the room. For a little while, Joseph knew what it was to be received. He often told Treves he wished he could lie down to sleep “like other people.” One afternoon he tried. The weight of his head did what years of cruelty had not quite managed. He was twenty-seven. No one will ever know why such suffering was laid upon one quiet soul. Perhaps it was so the rest of us could see, without excuse, that goodness can survive where almost nothing else does—and that there was, in him, an abundance of it. There is more to Joseph Merrick than the name they hung on him, more than the photographs and the pity. When the time and the means allow, I will tell the story that should have been told all along: not of an object of curiosity, but of a man who deserved to be remembered for the warmth he never stopped offering a world that had given him so little of it in return. The next time you think you have problems, think of what Mr. Merrick endured. You don't have it nearly as bad as he did. Keep turning the pages. Keep walking to the light on the horizon. Your future is waiting for you to arrive.