The Price of being Peter Parker
There is something almost cruel about a man who spends his life saving others, only to discover that life has snatched nearly everything he once wanted to save for himself. Would we blame him if he finally grew tired and fed up? If, one day, he looked upon another stranger in danger and thought, Why must it always be me? Have I not suffered enough? Let someone else be good for once?
That seems to me a more interesting question than whether a hero will go on fighting. We admire the person who rises again, give his suffering a noble meaning, and forget how absurd it may seem to demand goodness from someone who has already paid the price for it. But perhaps the real question is whether after receiving so many blows, he can resist the desire to inflict one himself.
This is what’s been on my mind ever since I watched Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Peter Parker has lost something more painful than the people he loves. He has lost his standing in their lives. MJ is still alive, and so is his best friend Ned, but neither recognizes him. They continue to exist in the world he vigilantly protects, but he is. now a stranger in theirs. And he chose it that way. He chose this separation because he believed that keeping them away from his life as Spider-Man would spare them from the dangers that followed him. In protecting them, he thus sacrificed the possibility of being known by them, of being loved by MJ, and the possibility of sharing the future he might have once imagined.
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There is a special kind of pain in this kind of sacrifice. The ones you love are safe, but you cannot share their happiness. You can be within the eyeshot of the life you wanted and, at the same time, remain too far away to belong to it. And you must learn to live with that distance, without demanding that the people you protected. comprehend what you gave up for them.
Maybe letting go means learning to accept that there are some futures that will never arrive. It does not mean that it will not hurt when you realise they are truly lost, or that we must pretend the sacrifice was easy to bear. It means you have decided to continue living even when there is nothing left for you to reclaim.
Yet there is always this danger in allowing grief to make us bitter. Life will deal a thousand hammer blows at us, and one day the hammer may rest in our own hands. We can strike because we have been struck, exacting revenge on strangers. Or we can choose otherwise.
Peter cannot regain the life he sacrificed. His goodness does not guarantee him happiness, nor does the world promise to pay him back. Still, he protects the people who may never learn his name, let alone understand his suffering. Perhaps that is the point of goodness. One does not need the world to reward him before he does what is right.
We may never live the lives we thought we would. We may lose people who are still alive, the futures that once seemed certain, and parts of ourselves that we will never recover. But we can keep growing, keep protecting those we love, and refuse to cause pain to others simply because we have suffered.
Life will beat us with a thousand hammers. But when it is our turn to hold one, let us learn to strike softly.
