A website about being a friend when life falls apart.

I was in a Lisbon airport eight months after my husband’s death in early winter of 2000, exhausted from a night of traveling and a long layover at Charles de Gaulle Airport, the earthly testing ground for purgatory. The outfitter I had hired from my desk in Virginia, fumbling with my phone and my credit card, was not there. The trip to Portugal was an eleventh-hour escape from my first wedding anniversary as a widow. I had somehow felt, until the last possible minute, I could face the prospect of spending this night alone in my (our) bedroom. But as the day drew near, my resolve to be a pulled-together person crumbled.

I got married on October 3, 1992, in almost pitch darkness.

I had always wanted an evening wedding with candlelight. Aside from the romantic reasons, people generally look better in candlelight. Earlier that day, I’d had a huffy little tête-à-tête over it with my childhood church choir director, Judy. Judy was a reedy, elderly woman who had commanded the pipe organ for no less than four decades. We were sitting on the last row of pews, and she was holding the one tool in existence that could dim or brighten the huge Gothic chandeliers of the nave. She reached over to the control panel anchored on the seat-back in front of us and twisted a knob until the church resembled an indoor arena.

We sometimes forget that our small kindnesses really matter. A note, an afternoon walk, dinner—how can it make a real difference in a friend’s problems? We’d do well to keep in mind Edward Everett Hale’s inspiring words, “I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; I will not refuse to do the something I can do.” In the scheme of things, our seemingly insignificant deeds—the unplanned gestures and words—may matter most of all.

A caregiver friend of mine tells the story of being ‘uninvited’ to a dinner party. Her husband had younger-onset Alzheimer’s, although few people were aware of his illness then. He enjoyed people and compensated for his problems by staying quiet for the most part. The hostess, though, learning of his diagnosis through a mutual friend, called to retract her invitation.

. . . As we spent this more intimate time together, though, she disclosed the reason for the tears. Her son was in a terrible situation with no conceivable way out, and she felt overwhelmed with worry.

I was stunned. I couldn’t believe I had simply assumed at first they weren’t ‘real’ tears. Why hadn’t I asked, Are you okay? I could have let it go if she didn’t want to say. But what had kept me from asking? Her pretense of not crying, despite how obvious it was?

. . . Still, there are ways to control misery, so it does not run pell-mell over the entire landscape of your being, mainly through recognizing it for what it is: a fierce inner beast with states of rest and arousal, that will, we all hope, eventually slink away.

The weekend ahead surely held the promise of fun. I was spending a few days at another friend’s river house, an old brick colonial hemmed in by an expanse of lawn and landscaped beds, from which the Potomac River stretches like a vast silver mirror, undulating, alive and quietly reassuring.

I was not a caregiver to my late husband, not in the sense of someone who tends to a person with Alzheimer’s disease. My husband didn’t have dementia. He had a rare brain tumor, growing like a pointed tool into his brain stem. The nine-hour surgery to remove it seemed to remove, as well, his sense of self and place in the world.

No amount of care I could give made up for this sudden loss. He felt bewildered and scared. I wasn’t strong enough to hold him against the undertow of his dizziness, confusion, depression, insomnia, and failed confidence. But I tried.