He Helped Us Imagine Who We Could Become

Patrick Stewart’s legacy lives in the people he helped protect, the courage he encouraged, and the care we carry forward.

Some people help raise us without ever knowing us.

They arrive through a book, a song, or a television screen. They offer us a way to understand ourselves before we have the words to explain what hurts, and sometimes what they give us stays long enough to become part of the way we love other people. For me, Patrick Stewart was one of those people.

He died this week at 86, and I keep thinking about the children who found something to hold on to in the characters he brought to life. I was one of them. Long before I knew much about the man behind Professor Charles Xavier, I knew what it meant to watch a wise professor look at children the world feared or misunderstood and see possibility.

I suffered abuse as a child at the hands of my biological father. I also grew up with ADHD, trying to understand a mind that could feel difficult to live inside and even more difficult to explain. The X-Men movies and the comics gave me somewhere to put some of that. There were people whose differences were visible, whose power frightened others, whose lives had been shaped by cruelty, and there was this professor who believed they had something worth developing. He could see a future for them. He wanted them to see it too.

There is a particular kind of hope in that when you’re a child who has been hurt. Someone older and wiser recognizes that you have power, that you can learn to use it, that you can stand against something terrible. You get to imagine yourself growing into a person who can help. The story leaves room for you beyond what has happened to you.

Professor X gave me a way to think about goodness as something you practice with whatever abilities you have. You could be frightened and still have a conscience. You could feel different and still belong among people trying to protect one another. You could have a mind that refused to behave conveniently and still have something valuable to offer. Apparently, saving humanity would occasionally require an inconvenient brain. This was encouraging news.

Patrick Stewart brought such steadiness to that role. There was intelligence in it, and gentleness, and the conviction that these young people were worth the trouble of understanding. I can’t separate what that meant to me from the man whose face and voice carried it.

This week, reading about his life beyond the screen, I learned more about another child who had needed protection. Stewart spoke publicly about growing up witnessing his father’s violence toward his mother. He became an ambassador for Refuge in 2007, giving his time to events and fundraising and speaking about the lasting effects of domestic abuse on children. In its tribute, Refuge credited his advocacy with contributing to better protection, including the recognition of children as victims in their own right under the Domestic Abuse Act 2021.

That recognition matters. A child living with violence has a life being shaped by it, even when the adults are the ones being discussed. To recognize that child in law is to give public weight to suffering that can remain terribly private. Stewart worked alongside people trying to make that suffering harder to overlook.

Amnesty International remembered the courage his honesty gave to survivors. In a 2017 interview with Sarah Brown, he explained his commitment to Refuge with a sentence I’ve had to sit with: “I do this activism for my mother because I couldn’t do it for her there.”

There is so much love, and so much helplessness, inside that sentence. A child couldn’t provide the protection his mother needed. The adult he became could help support protection for someone else. I think there’s a lesson about hope in allowing both things to be true. What happened remains wrong. The years can’t be returned, but there are still people within reach of our care, and something we can do for them today.

His advocacy also made room for a difficult understanding of his father. Through exploring his father’s wartime history, Stewart learned about the psychological injuries he’d brought home from the Second World War. He went on to support Combat Stress, which provides specialist mental health care for veterans.

Understanding that history leaves his father responsible for the abuse. It also raises a question about the suffering we might prevent by getting people help. Stewart supported care for those harmed by violence and treatment for veterans living with trauma. I see hope in that willingness to work on more than one part of a terrible problem.

No survivor owes the world a campaign, or forgiveness, or a useful lesson. Stewart’s choices matter because they were choices. He used the influence available to him to help other people find support. That’s a form of power I wish we celebrated more often: the ability to make another person safer. Fame gave his voice reach. He chose to use that reach to support people doing the daily work of care.

He supported the International Rescue Committee for more than a decade, raising awareness and funds for people displaced by war and disaster. In a 2019 appeal, he asked listeners to imagine suddenly losing their homes and having to work out where to take their families and who would help them. He directed that concern toward an organization providing food, shelter, medical care, and support for rebuilding lives.

He also recorded Patrick Stewart’s Cowboy Classics to benefit the IRC’s relief work. I find something wonderful in the idea that the same voice that could carry Shakespeare or command a starship could put on a cowboy hat and help raise money for people in danger. There are a surprising number of ways to be useful once you start looking.

His compassion reached animals too. He and his wife Sunny fostered Ginger, a pit bull, in 2017, followed by other dogs. He supported campaigns against dogfighting and challenged the prejudices surrounding the breed; the ASPCA honored that work in 2021. Here was another chance to use the affection people already felt for him to help them look more kindly at someone else.

I love that there’s room in this life for Shakespeare and starships and a foster dog who needs somewhere safe to sleep. Tenderness can be that expansive. A person can care about a family displaced by war and a frightened animal, and allow both to ask something of him.

The lesson I keep finding in his humanitarian work is that hope needs somewhere to go. Concern can become support for a refuge. An understanding of trauma can become advocacy for treatment. The ability to entertain can become a way to raise money for relief. Each act joins the work of other people. Refuge workers, clinicians, aid workers, foster families, campaigners, and donors all have a part. Stewart could draw attention to their work, and invite more people into it. That makes the hope feel possible to me, because there are so many places to begin.

He had seen enough cruelty to understand what people are capable of. Still, he kept investing his time and his voice in our capacity to protect one another. I find that more sustaining than any assurance that everything will turn out well. It gives me something to do while the outcome is uncertain. A person can help make one part of the world safer before knowing whether the rest of it will follow.

I’m raising children now. My husband and I are trying to give them a childhood in which their voices matter, and I think often about how much responsibility there is in being the adult someone depends on. I want my children to know they can tell us when something feels wrong. I want them to be able to disagree, to ask questions, to bring us feelings that are inconvenient or difficult to hear. I want them to know that being small doesn’t make what happens to them small.

Those are things we have to make real in the ordinary life of our home. We have to listen when we are tired. We have to remember that a child who is still learning to explain a feeling deserves the time it takes to find the words. We have to be willing to hear an answer we didn’t expect.

We are human, and there are days when exhaustion arrives well before bedtime. There are schedules, bills, missing costume pieces, and a remarkable number of opinions about things that seemed very straightforward before we had children. Sometimes everyone needs something at once, and my brain has already wandered off to supervise a completely unrelated emergency.

Still, this is the work I want to keep returning to: making sure they know they can come to us.

I want their confidence to have somewhere safe to grow. I want them to recognize cruelty, including when it comes dressed as authority, and trust that their own discomfort deserves attention. I want them to discover what they can do with their voices while they’re surrounded by people who are glad to hear them.

And I want them to have the ordinary freedom to be children. To be ridiculous. To wear the costume, need the wizard staff, change their minds, and become absorbed in some small, wonderful thing because they feel safe enough to give it their whole attention. They deserve that childhood for themselves. They have their own lives to live.

When I think about the frightened child I was and the mother I’m trying to be, I can see some of what those stories helped make possible. Professor Xavier offered me an image of an adult who helped young people recognize their strength. I have carried that image into a life where children look to me.

Stewart never knew me. He never knew what I was coping with when I watched those movies, or that someday I would be sitting here trying to explain how his work had traveled all the way into the care I want to give my children.

That’s one of the things that keeps me hopeful about humanity. Care can become part of what another person knows how to do. Someone listens to a frightened child, and that child learns that being heard is possible. Someone speaks publicly about abuse, and another person finds words for an experience they have carried alone. We make more room for the next act of courage each time we take one seriously.

The harm done to a child can reach into the future. So can the protection we offer. I want to give that second possibility as much of my life as I can. Stewart’s example asks something of us here. We can notice whose voice is missing, support the people providing safety, and speak when it would be easier to leave a painful subject alone. We can help make our homes places where a child’s words are welcomed. Each of those choices gives someone a reason to believe that help can exist, and helps make it exist.

When I look at my children, I feel how much remains unfinished in this world. I also see lives still opening, beliefs still forming, voices still discovering their strength. There is so much we can give them while they grow. That is where hope becomes real for me: in the care we choose now, reaching forward into people who will carry it farther than we can see.

Thank you, Sir Patrick, for the professor, for the captain, for all the work that brought people joy. Thank you for using the voice we recognized to help us hear people we might otherwise have overlooked. Somewhere along the way, you helped a little girl imagine that she had power.

She grew up, she has children of her own now, and she wants them to know they have it too.

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