Human life is worth more than a moving epitaph.

Narratives of self-sacrifice, martyrdom by any other name, for the pursuit of some noble cause… they’re commonplace. They’re often stirring, certainly, and I at least have been raised to look up to them and see them as good stories, good narratives. They’re often held up as something to emulate.

This is especially true in military stories—read nearly any posthumous Medal of Honor citation—but it’s pervasive. This theme of martyrdom for a greater cause runs through many movement narratives. It’s present any time there’s a question of some greater struggle in the name of social change (or other change). And any time that we commemorate those who’ve given their lives to some movement, intentionally or not, we run the risk of continuing to promote a martyr-cult.

This does everyone a disservice.

It ignores the people who are serving a movement by operating behind the scenes in support roles. It ignores the people who were there beside the one who died but who did not lose their own lives. It plays into all the same narrative structures that fill warrior-fetishizing hero worship. It encourages brinksmanship. It does not teach us to counter our detractors as effectively as we might.

It blinds us to the virtues of living for a cause instead.

I’m guilty of writing stories and narratives that follow this pattern. I’m guilty of writing pieces that dwell on self-sacrifice to the exclusion of finding some other way forward. I still like them, they still hit some note in my chest that twinges in just the right rewarding way.

But I want to add stories that feature people working together to seek something good without sacrificing themselves. And when people we care for die, I want to include the deaths of those we love in ways that celebrate how they lived rather than how they died. Perhaps because of the shape of my own struggle with suicidal ideation and thoughts of self-harm, I want people to find strength in ideals that preserve them rather than in ideals for which they may sacrifice themselves.