Suggested by a couple of cynical threads I don’t intend to link to. I’d rather people shared stories in which they were helped or comforted by people they didn’t know, but I don’t object to the the reverse. I’m fairly sure I’m not the boss of y’all anyhow.
I’ll start with something that happened not quite five years ago, shortly after my mother’s funeral. Mother had been ill for years, so her death was no surprise, and yet I was devastated by it, far more so than I expected to be. We had some unsettled business. I don’t mean things I held against her; I mean things I felt the need to atone for, ask forgiveness for.
For a variety of reasons that now sound idiotic, I was not at the hospital when Mother die; by the time I was able to get there her body had already been moved. In the four days betwen her death and funeral I was never able to spend any time alone with her body, which I desperately wanted to do; the best I could do was write her a letter about those issues to place it in her casket.
The funeral came. I went alone to the church beforehand, hoping that might be my chance to spend alone with her; but unfortunately, because Mother was so beloved, the church had a dozens of people in it over an hour before the service. The best I could do was put the letter in her casket.
By coincidence Mother was buried not far from my office. Some days after her funeral I went to her gravesite. The cemetery staff gave me a map to help me find it, but I had trouble because the grave was still unmarked. But as I searched I drew the attention of a man whose name I sadly do not recall. He was there to visit his own mother’s grave and had inferred what I was doing; so he approached me and helped me find the grave. Then he walked off a bit; I thought he’d left entirely. That was good, because I wanted to be alone. So I stood there awhile talking to what was left of Mother, and I cried like a baby. After what seemed like forever I left. As I did I found that the guy had not gone away entirely; he’d moved out of earshot but not out of sight. He walked with me to my car, and comforted me by telling me about his own mother, how it had felt to lose her, and that I would feel better in time; and that I should not fear I was betraying her by feeling less crushed by misery.
I owe him a major debt I cannot repay, except by paying it forward.
Anyway, that’s just me. Anybody else?