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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/jun/28/12-little-acts-of-kindness-what-friends-and-strangers-did-for-each-other-in-their-hour-of-need>
"I have a fond memory from a Monday a month or so after my mum died. My friend
Deb’s son, then three years old, was playing hide and seek with my daughter of
the same age. He picked a delightfully impressive hiding place, wedging himself
into the bottom of my floor-to-ceiling shelves. He was wearing camouflage print
and against the usual domestic detritus on our shelves proved genuinely
difficult to find. Quite a feat.
I properly laughed, for which I was truly grateful. It had been quite a while
since I had laughed like that. Deb was there to deliver dinner for us all;
something she had promised to do a few days earlier. A family meal, every
Monday, for the next few weeks.
“That is beyond nice of you, but way too much of an ask,” I said.
“OK, but you’re not asking, I’m just doing it,” she replied. “Just accept and
enjoy while you get through the grey.”
Grief can come in many shades. For me, there was the glowing red panic of my
mum’s cancer prognosis that was falling off a cliff so fast we could barely
keep up. Then there was the searing white heat of her actual death, and the
blinding fame that comes with being the bereaved at the centre of a tragic
circus. And then came the grey. That point when I was due to get to back to
normal life, except everything was entirely abnormal because how could it
possibly be anything else? A meteor had struck and left a gaping abyss in my
world which I was somehow meant to avoid falling into.
Deb intuited Mondays were my greyest days. The day of the week that I was
solely responsible for my three-year-old and not quite one-year-old. The day of
the week my mum had called her “Abigail Mondays” because that was the day she
would devote to me and my children, ever since I had moved back to my home town
to be closer to her 18 months earlier. After her death, I was a shell of a
person by teatime on a Monday, struggling to function with two young children
relying on me for their care. That is when Deb knocked on with dinner.
Friends and family did so many wonderfully kind things for me at that time,
each act of compassion like a thread of a safety net they collectively sewed to
prevent me from freefalling into the abyss. Deb’s Monday meals-on-wheels were a
particularly robust bit of net that I will never forget.
So we asked you, our readers, for the good memories of your worst of times. For
some, it is a lifelong friend who ran to their rescue; for others, a perfect
stranger who showed them extraordinary kindness when they needed it most. From
grand, country-crossing gestures to just listening, all of them acted as a balm
to souls at their weariest. Like a homemade meal for your family on a grey
Monday."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
