It’s not strength that makes the hero. It’s weakness. It’s the crack in the armor.
We know this for certain deep down, even if we don’t like to admit it, even if we prefer to focus on the phenomenal powers and invincibility of the comic book characters we love. Maybe we don’t like to admit that our own pain or vulnerability has value. Better to shove it off into the corner, ignore its call, and pretend it doesn’t exist. But sometimes the bad in our lives is what makes us yearn to be good, to fight harder.
So when I hear the name Iron Man, I don’t think of the indestructible suit that encases Tony Stark’s body. To me, the “iron” in that name calls to mind the inoperable fragments of metal embedded in his chest, edging forward like razor-sharp debris in a glacier, perilously close to puncturing the muscle that pumps blood through his body.
Iron Man has a bad heart. And this—not the armor—is his true strength.
It took me a long time to realize this, but a big brother and a little sister I know figured it out a lot earlier. My wife, Jill, was born with a bad heart, and her brother, Grant Piontek, protected her and cared for her long before I entered the picture. Even though he was a few years older than her—an age when most big brothers only tend to pass torment on to smaller siblings—he was the type of guy who didn’t mind sharing his comic book collection full of damaged heroes, bulletproof bravery, and life-changing miracles at a time when she desperately needed strength.
Tony Stark was their hero, but the two of them—they’re my heroes. So this is their story—Grant and Jill, the big strong kid and an ailing little girl. It’s about the kind of friendship and love formed over a lifetime that truly is indestructible. I’d say it’s a bond forged in iron, but it’s actually a lot stronger than that.
* * *
Okay, so this theory of mine: Tony Stark has the high-tech, mechanical suit of armor, he can soar through the air like a fighter jet, and he’s got the repulsor beams in his palms to blast away foes like you’d wave away mosquitoes. All that is devastatingly powerful, sure. But villains have power, too. Strength doesn’t define good or bad. Stark built the metal suit, but that weak, vulnerable heart? That’s what built the hero. Everything else is simply a … utility.
That calls to mind a different hero from another universe: to me, Iron Man is to Marvel what Batman is to DC. They’re both what the Hulk would call “puny humans” (albeit billionaire, playboy philanthropists) with no otherworldly abilities beyond obsessive willpower and a deep-rooted scorn for injustice. It’s not Bruce Wayne’s money, genius, or physical prowess that make him a warrior for the right, it’s the loss of his parents. It’s the pain that doesn’t leave him, one he hopes to spare others. It’s the symbolic hole in his heart.
In Stark’s case, that hole is dangerously close to being literal.
Iron Man might never have been born if an explosion hadn’t pierced the sternum of weapons designer Tony Stark in 1963’s Tales of Suspense 39. After triggering a land mine in Vietnam, he was kidnapped by the Communist warlord Wong-Chu and enslaved as a munitions maker. Let’s say Stark had been captured uninjured—the shrewd engineer could’ve still assembled some diabolical gadget to blast himself free, but without the shrapnel in his chest, he wouldn’t have had to continue wearing that armor. The magnetized transistors (in the movies, it’s the glowing ARC reactor) were needed to draw those metallic shards away from his ticker.
Becoming a victim of a blast, being on the business end of an explosion, opened Stark’s eyes to the pain his weaponry was causing others. It triggered empathy in a man who previously had none, who probably never even thought about the consequences of the devices he created. This is the value of pain. In our nervous system, it makes us withdraw from things that cut or burn or freeze or destroy. In our hearts (the metaphorical ones), pain can make us run toward those things, if only to help stop them from hurting others.
The suit kept Tony Stark alive, and that led him to dedicate his life to keeping others alive. Most of us don’t ever get to do anything so dramatic, unless we’re soldiers, firefighters, cops, or happen to be bystanders at some terrible accident that gives us the chance to put our own well-being aside for the sake of someone else. But in an age of selfishness and cynicism, when empathy and generosity seem to be in short supply, it’s enough in the real world just to be a good guy, someone who doesn’t battle supervillains but who simply goes out of his or her way to make the world a slightly more decent place. Superheroes take the good and bad we can do and just magnify it to larger-than-life perspectives. Still, we find inspiration in them, just like we have since storytelling began.
Iron Man is my favorite hero because Tony Stark could easily have gone the villain route, could easily have become Marvel’s Lex Luthor instead of its Batman, but instead he became a hero thanks to that life-threatening metal embedded inside him, perpetually reminding him of his frailty, of his weakness. I have a soft spot for bad hearts, which is why Tony Stark reminds me so much of Jill and my brother-in-law, Grant. My wife’s bad heart made her brother choose to be her hero.
* * *
Jill was born with tetralogy of Fallot, commonly known as a hole in the heart, which made her valves operate a little like a cracked straw. Children who are born with this defect tend to be called “blue babies” because their hearts can’t deliver enough oxygen. Until my wife’s generation—kids born in the late seventies—there wasn’t a lot that doctors could do to help. Just like Iron Man, that terrifying threat to the heart was just something to live with. Or not live at all.
The story of Jill and Grant is the story of the eternal war between big brothers and little sisters turned upside down. As a former mean big brother myself, we definitely do not share our comic books with bratty little sisters. It’s practically treasonous to invite younger siblings into the world of superheroes, monsters, and the cosmic secrets of the universe. But that’s exactly what Grant did back around 1982, when he would’ve been about eleven and Jill would’ve been around five. He had started getting into comic books. Deep into them. Religious cult kind of deep. Over the years, he amassed a collection of thousands, and this was no passing childhood fad. When he grew up, he started putting out a Christmas tree each year decorated in nothing but superhero ornaments, and in recent years, amid this modern renaissance of comic book movies, Grant turned out for the first night of every single one of them. He was also a skydiver, car enthusiast, Harley rider, and hiker. He was a lifelong geek and adventurer who turned Jill into both of those things, too.
Grant was the middle child, and his older sister, Kelli, was also born with congenital heart problems. She underwent surgery when she was five years old to correct it, and although she made it through okay, that fear never left the household. Heart surgery on a small child is always scary, but back in those days the technology was far less advanced, and the success nowhere near certain. The Piontek family knew this devastating truth already, better than any family should.
When Jill’s father was a teenager, his baby sister was also was born with a hole in her heart. A blue baby. Her name was Audrey, and she died on June 1, 1960, just two years and one month old. Almost. Her brief life ended just short of that month marker by two days.
The memory of that lost little girl consumed this family and haunts them to this day, more than five decades later. As a result, when Kelli was born, they knew how rapidly a bad situation could turn unspeakably tragic.
Kelli had her surgery, and she survived. But when Grant was born, he was the family’s first fully healthy child in decades. I imagine he seemed like a miracle baby, a little Hercules, just for being normal, and he grew up knowing his health and strength were an unusual blessing in a family cursed with faulty genes. He understood that sometimes others, like his sister Kelli, came first, because they weren’t as fortunate.
When Jill was born, eight years younger than her sister and six years younger than her brother, she was even more frail and vulnerable. You can tell from the old photos of her at that age—something was wrong. She had the same bright eyes and big smile of any toddler, but she’s distressingly thin and there’s something in her expression that seems distant and out of place. It’s fear.
Every time I look at that stretched and faded scar that still runs down the center of her chest, I think of the tiny child who overheard whispered talk of another little girl with a bad heart, a long-ago child named Audrey, who never got to grow up.
I think of Jill being wheeled into a hospital. Her parents and doctors telling her everything would be okay. But she knew that was a lie meant to reassure her. She was just a kid, but she’d heard them talking about Audrey, and she knew other little boys and girls from her floor who went in for surgery and never came back.
Jill was one of the lucky kids. She made it.
It was scary, but that little girl was tougher than she looked, and she was in the hands of some expert doctors who knew just how to stitch up a miniature heart. After the surgery, in the years that followed, the main person who helped her feel strong was her big brother. If Jill needed a heart today, she could have mine. But back then, I know Grant would have given her his.
* * *
There wasn’t much Grant could do to heal his little sister medically, but he filled her life with comics that inspired her spirit—stories of people who went through horrible accidents and somehow came out stronger. Peter Parker, bitten by a spider full of radioactive toxins and spurred to a life of crime fighting by the murder of his beloved uncle. Superman, who comes to Earth with the power to do nearly anything—except save his annihilated home world of Krypton. Captain America, who also loses everything after being trapped in ice as the world he knew receded into history. Later, Jill became a librarian and loved that her profession was shared by Barbara Gordon, aka Batgirl, who was left a paraplegic by a gunshot from the Joker in 1988’s Batman: The Killing Joke but resurrected herself to fight back in a different way as the superhacker Oracle. Comics are full of wounded people whose pain makes them stronger.
Then, of course, there was Tony Stark. The man in the metal mask. The guy whose weak spot and strong spot was right in the center of his chest.
Although I associate Grant with Iron Man, his other favorite hero was a different Marvel character: Wolverine, the cigar-chomping, tough-talking, clawed badass with the adamantium skeleton and the power to regenerate instantly. A part of me wonders if the superpowered healing had some subconscious influence over why he loved that surly member of the X-Men so much. Growing up with two sisters who fought like hell to recover from traumatic surgeries, I imagine there was something cathartic about a guy who never even needed a Band-Aid.
Everything Grant did, Jill imitated. Grant loved comics, so she loved comics. Grant played Pop Warner football, and Jill and Kelli signed on as cheerleaders. Grant took up photography in college, and so did teenage Jill. He started studying history, and that inspired her to follow the same major as an undergraduate.
The first member of her family I ever met was her brother, and it was nerve-racking. Like meeting Superman. I’d heard a lot about this guy Grant, and knew how much he meant to Jill. I’d also seen pictures of him, and he was disturbingly handsome. You wouldn’t want to pose next to him in a photo because he made mortal men look like garden gnomes.
He could have pulled the tough guy routine on me. He could have squeezed my hand harder than was comfortable to make sure I knew who was the bigger man. (It was he, the bodybuilder, by a lot.) But he didn’t pull any of that macho nonsense. After all those years looking after his sister, maybe he could tell when he met someone who intended to do the same.
Jill’s a sweetheart, soft-spoken and kind. She’s also itty-bitty, standing just five feet tall, although … okay, let’s just give her that one. On her chest, starting just a few inches below her neck, running vertically down, you can see the scar from her surgery, like a dry riverbed viewed from an airplane. Her heartbeat still has a murmur, and she goes for routine cardiology checkups, but otherwise, she’s fine. She has given birth to two healthy babies. Our oldest daughter, now six, is named Audrey.
We chose that name during one of our sonogram sessions, when the doctor let us listen to this baby-to-be’s nascent heart and told us it was perfect.
I knew Audrey would grow up having one of the coolest uncles in the world, since he was already the greatest big brother in the world, not just to Jill but to me, too.
About a year before our little girl was born, my wife and I started calling Grant by a new nickname: Iron Man.
* * *
This was summer of 2008, and Marvel Studios had kicked off its cinematic universe with a new film starring Robert Downey Jr., and as soon as we walked out of the theater, my wife and I turned to each other.
“Did he remind you of…?”
We called Grant immediately. It was a comparison he was happy to embrace.
The thing is, Grant not only looked like Robert Downey Jr., he acted like him. The charming wiseass routine, the paradoxical self-deprecating cockiness, the billion-dollar smile that beckoned you to join him on whatever mischief or caper he intended to perpetrate. Grant was fond of making blisteringly rude asides, then turning to the person who seemed to be most shocked and asking, “Oh my god, why would you say that?”
Grant was the blue-collar version of the billionaire playboy philanthropist.
In his twenties and early thirties, he had worked as a bartender at a pool hall, which made him a confidante and caregiver to a hell of a lot of people in both their happiest and darkest times—and most of them never forgot it. He seemed to be friends with everyone, and his future wife, Michelle, who came to Arizona from Illinois, quickly got to know everyone in Tucson simply by visiting a bar, a Trader Joe’s, a church, or anywhere in that city with Grant Piontek at her side. He was the type of person who made friends everywhere and kept them forever.
But the charm thing … I can’t overstate this. He later took a job as a corporate trainer with Golden Eagle, a local Budweiser distributor, but he was such a charismatic representative of the brand (and easy on the eyes) that they started using him as a model in advertisements. He was up on billboards. All over town. That flawless smile. Surrounded by people having fun. The King of Beers.
Jill and I settled in Los Angeles, where I found work as a reporter, and she pursued her career as a librarian. I write about movies for a living, and Grant always wanted to know the latest on whatever comic book adaptation was in the works. When we’d come back to visit Tucson, hitting the town with Grant was like hanging out with a real celebrity. You could see what a lifetime of goodwill had built for him. Grant looked out for everyone. And everyone returned the favor.
He was the Tony Stark of Tucson. Except, Grant didn’t have a bad heart.
That’s what we thought.
* * *
“Anthony, are you with Jill?”
Kelli’s husband was on the phone. A cool October morning in 2009. Audrey was a little over one month old and Jill was about to leave home with her for a routine checkup with the pediatrician.
“Hold on,” I said. “I’ll go get her.”
“Don’t,” he said. “Get somewhere she can’t hear.”
This was weird. This was wrong. I walked into the backyard, out of earshot.
Grant had a heart attack, I was told.
I remember saying “What?” over and over again, not from shock but pure disbelief. Those words simply made no sense. The next few words didn’t either.
“He’s gone.”
He’s gone.
* * *
It’s still hard to believe, more than six years later. Grant can’t be gone. Superheroes fall, but they always get up.
Grant was the portrait of physical fitness, and he was only thirty-eight years old. People in perfect health who are that young don’t die unexpectedly. They just don’t.
Except … it happened. It happened to him. It happened to us, his family. Again. Another child gone.
In the months before, Grant had told his mother, Patty, that he was thinking of going to the doctor. He was having weird chest pains, but maybe it was just a pulled muscle. He wasn’t sure. My mother-in-law urged him to get checked out immediately, but Grant let it go. If it had been Jill or Kelli, they may have rushed to the emergency room, but Grant was never the one with the bad heart. That particular ailment had passed him by.
Then one day he said good-bye to Michelle and headed north to Flagstaff for a work conference, but on the morning of his presentation, Grant was a no-show. He wasn’t answering any calls or texts either. They went to his hotel room, and there was no answer.
The evening before, Grant had excused himself early from dinner with his colleagues, saying he was feeling unusually tired. No one knew it then, but part of his heart had begun to tear just slightly. Basically, a leak breaks through, then the dam blows. Stats say 40 percent of people die instantaneously from aortic dissection. That’s what we believe happened to Grant.
For all his life, he was the strong one. But when that hidden flaw inside finally gave way, it was catastrophic. There was no surviving.
Jill’s heart, her actual heart, is still strong. But the thing inside us we call by that term, the thing that loves and aches and yearns … it hasn’t been the same since.
* * *
When they were kids, superheroes were an armor Grant threw around Jill to make her feel brave, to make her feel powerful. But really, he was the armor. His strength became her strength. So when I think of Grant, I think of Iron Man. And when I think of Iron Man, I think of Tony Stark’s heart, always just a fragment away from stopping forever.
Whenever a new Marvel movie comes out with Robert Downey Jr. as the character, my wife watches him onscreen with a smile on her face and tears in her eyes. Every wisecrack of Stark’s leads to a laugh and pang of sorrow. When our son was born in 2013, Iron Man 3 was his first movie. Ultron and Thanos themselves couldn’t have stopped her from packing up our two-month-old little boy and hustling him to a Mommy and Me screening.
It’s not Grant up there onscreen, of course, but … it feels like him. Same wiseass remarks. Same devilish charm. Same self-effacing nobility. And Jill knows her big brother would want to be sitting in that theater alongside her, watching one of their favorite heroes fight the good fight.
After Grant’s funeral, my wife and I sat on a bed in her sister’s house and tried to figure out what to do next. There was no changing what happened. Heroes always resurrect in the comics, but not in the real world. So how do you move forward when such a big part of your life is gone?
“We have to live twice as hard,” I suggested. “Because he can’t. We have to make the most of our time, out of the years he was cheated.” And we’ve tried to do that, tried not to waste what we’ve been given. We’ve tried to remember what he stood for, and stand for those things. We tell our kids this, too.
There’s a crack in our armor, and no fixing it. But Iron Man is proof that even broken hearts can still beat strong.
Maybe strongest of all.