02/11/2025
Alot of the time when someone suffers a bereavement people tend to avoid in fear of saying the wrong thing.
Sometimes no words are needed, I’ve shared this from another page to show how acts of kindness can have a deep lasting impact 🤲🙏🫶
My husband died earlier this year, in the soft quiet of an April morning, after fighting for so long against a heart that no longer had the strength to keep up with the rest of him. He was only 71, but the last stretch of his life felt like a slow, painful goodbye. The kind where you can see the end coming, and even when you’ve prepared everything, it still shatters you when the moment finally arrives.
In those final weeks, our home didn’t look like our home. It looked like a place that was slowly learning to let go.
Hospice care had stepped in and transformed our family room into a kind of medical space. A hospital bed replaced the sofa we used to drink coffee on every Sunday. There were pill bottles lined up where our family photos had been. The air was thick with quiet beeping and the slow rhythm of breathing machines.
I couldn’t bring myself to leave his side, but I knew I had to sleep at some point. So I posted in a local Facebook group, a kind, busy community page where neighbors offered items they no longer needed. I wrote a simple request—just asking if anyone had a baby monitor I could borrow, so I could rest and still hear him if he needed me.
I expected a short reply. Maybe someone telling me to try the pharmacy or suggesting I buy one online. Instead, a woman reached out and told me she had exactly what I needed. Not just a baby monitor, but one that she would personally bring to me.
Her name was Carol. I didn’t know her. She lived maybe ten minutes away, but we’d never met.
She came to the house with the monitor in a small bag and stood in my kitchen, calm and patient, showing me how to turn it on, how to set the volume, how to make sure the battery wouldn't die in the middle of the night.
I was exhausted. I know I thanked her, but now, looking back, I don’t think I said it in a way that matched what she gave me.
That monitor wasn’t just a piece of technology. It was relief. It meant I didn't have to fall asleep listening for footsteps or whispers or the sound of his breathing changing. I could rest on the couch or in the next room, close my eyes, and still hear him.
Sometimes I would wake up at 2 in the morning, heart racing from a dream I can’t remember, but the monitor would be there—humming softly, broadcasting the slow, uneven sound of his breath. That sound meant he was still here. That he hadn’t left me yet. It meant I could keep going.
I held onto that little device like a lifeline.
The morning he died, I sat beside him, holding his hand, listening to air move in and out of his lungs for the last time. His fingers were cold. His face was soft, relaxed. He looked like he was finally free of the weight he had carried for too long. I didn’t turn off the monitor until hours later, when the room was quiet enough to break me.
A week after the funeral, I messaged Carol again. I told her I was ready to return the baby monitor, and she told me to just leave it on the porch. She said she’d stop by to pick it up when she had the chance.
That afternoon, the doorbell rang. I assumed it was her coming to grab the monitor. I opened the door expecting a quick wave and a thank you.
Instead, there she was, standing on my front step with her arms full.
A potted plant with purple blooms. A plastic container of warm soup. A pasta dish. A huge bowl of chicken salad. All homemade. All carefully packed. She didn’t just come to pick up what was hers. She came to take care of someone she barely knew.
And that moment—standing there in my doorway with a stranger offering food and kindness—I felt something break inside me. A good kind of break. The kind where the grief shifts, even just a few inches, and makes room for something gentle.
I wasn’t expecting anything more than a borrowed monitor. I didn’t expect a person who would show up like a friend, even though we’d never had a single coffee together. I didn’t expect to be seen like that. Not by someone who didn’t owe me anything at all.
I told her I didn’t know how to thank her. She just smiled softly, like she didn’t want credit. Like she understood something I hadn’t realized yet.
Food doesn’t fix grief. But it does something just as important—it reminds you that you’re not alone inside it.
I sat at my kitchen table later that night, eating warm soup from a bowl that wasn’t mine, made by hands that had no reason to help me. I cried while I ate, but not the same kind of crying I’d been doing for weeks. Not the exhausted, aching kind. This was different.
This was the kind that says, “Somebody remembered that I’m still here.”
That simple act—just one person deciding to show up, quietly, intentionally—will stay with me for the rest of my life. She didn’t bring speeches or dramatic sympathy. She didn’t make promises she couldn’t keep. She simply walked into a house wrapped in grief and brought something human.
I have thanked her in messages since then, but thank you never feels big enough.
So I am writing this now, for her, and for anyone else like her:
There are people in the world who show up without being asked twice. People who don’t need to know your whole story to know you’re hurting. People who see a post about a baby monitor and understand that what you’re really asking for is help breathing through the worst days of your life.
I don’t know how kindness works exactly. I just know it always matters. Even when it feels small. Even when it’s quiet. It matters more than anything.
And I will never forget that woman, or her soup, or her plant, or the way she simply stepped into my world at the exact moment I was sure I had nothing left.
Sometimes the people who help you the most are the ones you met only once.
