Did the small things help? WHAT small things?
I don’t know what I would have done without my friends in the computer. I don’t even know where to start.
Between them, Kate, Alissa, Uberimma, Shanna, and Emma:
• kept me in coffee yogurts and homemade cookies
• made sure a stranger didn’t drive me to/from the airport even once in three visits
• drove in circles around central Israel to hang out with me – and made me feel like it was because they were excited to see me, not because they knew how badly I needed a break from watching my sister die
• sent care packages to my boys back home: amusements I’ll be glad of for weeks, on days when I want to be fully present for my kids, but can’t help my heart being somewhere else
• checked up on me without fail: urging me to spend as much time with my sister as I could, reassuring me that Lance and the kids would be fine, letting me cry on their shoulders at all hours of day or night
• dropped everything, the minute they heard, and rushed to the funeral
• came to sit with me every single day of shiva in Israel, so I’d have familiar faces amid a sea of people I didn’t know
• had every last detail of shiva in NY taken care of by the time I got back home
• spent all day traveling here, just to give me moral support
It wasn’t any one thing, although they all counted. It wasn’t any one person, although I will always remember each one. It was that no matter how far away I was – no matter how awful, heartbreaking, or unreal the path I was on – my friends never left me alone. I was never alone.
What else could anyone have done? What else can we ever do for each other? That’s everything. That’s all there is.
There are no words to thank you. I just want you to know: you did it right.
[NB: Persephone blogs here and often sports an extremely amusing Twitter feed @pphone]
This brought tears to my eyes. What an honor. Thank *you*.
No fair. There was no Kleenex warning.
I’m so grateful we could be there for you.
I sincerely hope never again to have the opportunity to deserve such an honor.
YES. That. Although did you hear my car bailed out Alissa today? My car is the unsung hero in all this. Also Alissa’s car…before it essploded.
And I think that the collective compulsion (of course only speaking for myself…) to just sort of close ranks around you and do–whatever–was because all of the people who would have normally been first in line to do that for you were tied up in it with you.
So you needed people who were close to you but not close to the situation, if that makes sense. And I think that you can’t get to a certain age in life* without that happening. You, and others, have done that for me. It was an honor to do it for you.
* I have no idea what that age is, but we’re all past it.
So sorry for your loss. Wishing you, your family and all your wonderful friends only good things…..
I agree that Kate is a very good person to have in your life.