Load bearing

When a brief visit turns into a whole lot more

A quick note: I wrote this one several weeks ago and then held onto it. The friend here ended up back in the hospital not once but twice. She's home now, doing better, and told me, "Anything to help someone else," when I asked if I could share part of her story. So, later…but with more of a real exhale.

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Prefer to listen? You’ll find an original audio recording here. ⤵️

I noticed the tubing first, a line of plastic dangling below the hem of her shirt. We’d been talking for a while by then, about the recent surgery, about being single, and loyal, about how hard it is to be human, how easy to direct our frustrations at the wrong targets, especially lately, about how the week had already been a lot before I even showed up, through the back porch door and across the recently bleached door mat, with a bag of food in my hands. I almost didn’t ask about the tube.

Pierre Bonnard, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

But I did, and that question unspooled into another, into an incision site that was red and hard and swollen, into a blood pressure cuff she keeps on hand, and a reading on it that had no business being that high. She had an appointment with her doctor the next morning at 10:00, she said, suggesting that would be soon enough for further input.

“You have to call now,” I said. “Get a hold of the on-call doctor. Let them decide whether you can wait until morning.”

She called. Before I left, she asked if I could maybe feed her dog later—a sweet, enormous, lump of a possibly-Great-Dane-mix who also happens to be diabetic and needs a twice-daily shot. I jotted some haphazard notes in my phone and said sure, half-laughing at what my day had just turned into.

I’d made a previous stop before I got to her place and had another one planned after, followed by a precious monthly phone call with a college friend whose 91-year-old father is failing and whose family is drowning in impossible decisions about his care. By the end of the afternoon, I told myself I might skip the gathering that evening, the one full of folks I genuinely love, because my introvert was having a tantrum about how peopled the day had been. I went anyway.

I’m not especially good at this. There’s so much I don’t show up for, calls I let go to voicemail, casseroles I never make, cards I used to send that now somehow never rise to the top of the list. Still, I’ve come to believe that a moment of care, even a tired and reluctant one, is rarely wasted. The world doesn’t get easier to live in, but I can’t shake the idea that it gets a little more bearable when someone shows up in it alongside you.

A few hours after I left her house, her sister-in-law drove her fifty miles to the hospital where they said they’d gotten all the cancer just two weeks ago. She was admitted, and the next morning she texted that she still didn’t know much, hadn’t eaten in case there was surgery to come. Someone else fed the dog and handled the shots.

Twenty-four hours later—my husband’s 65th birthday, a mostly ordinary day of doing what felt necessary and right, and also one spent celebrating a man whose favorite thing in the world is coming home at the end of the day to the people he loves—she wrote again:

“You started all of this. But honestly if I didn’t get here when I did, I wouldn’t be anywhere. It’s been a shit show. Looks like I’ll be here until Friday... I wanted to thank you for being right where I needed you... Do you have any idea how blessed we are with groups of women who genuinely care about each other? I really believe and now prove that this is just miraculous. I truly love my life. Even at this time.”

I wouldn’t be anywhere.

Pierre Bonnard, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I didn’t do anything but show up with some quirky food options and ask a question I almost didn’t ask. It’s such an unsettling, unexpected thing, to find out after the fact that an ordinary errand turned out to be load-bearing. You don’t get a notification for that. No algorithm tells you, in the moment, that this one matters more than it looks like. You just go, or you don’t, and sometimes you get to find out which one it was.

Often, it’s so much easier for me to just stay home, manage the usual, stick to the program, let the quiet and less complicated win. How close I came to skipping that one visit, that one question, that moment of discovery. I’ll never know what might have happened if I hadn’t ventured out.

It was the summer solstice that night, the longest light of the year, the sun reluctant to leave the sky as friends gathered in community to wish it well on its way. We talk about such rituals as though they are a turning point, a hinge the world swings on. But darkness doesn’t wait for an appointed season and lightness doesn’t depend on which way the year is turning. All we can ever do is reach our arms out and up, to catch the falling and honor the rising.

~Elizabeth

The evolving importance of that visit came in short updates, over the days after. A text here, a conversation there. I would never have imagined it unfolding that way.

I’d love to hear about the last time something small you did turned out to be bigger than you knew at the time, for better or worse. Or the reverse: when did you brace for a whole ordeal only to have it resolve without much fuss?

I read every comment and respond to all of them, so don’t be shy about adding yours. A heart 💚 or restack ♻️ is the lowest hanging fruit and helps other readers find my work. Yay!

I’ll be back next week, same as always, but a little older by then, since my birthday lands this Friday.

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Afterward:

I like to end with one concrete thing because I think it matters. Most weeks, most of us are working with what’s actually in front of us anyway, so…

Try this:

Think of one person you’ve been meaning to check on and ask them a specific question that they are less likely to answer routinely. How’s the incision healing rather than how are you doing? Did the second interview call ever happen instead of how’s the job search going? Is your mom still refusing the walker instead of how’s your mom? You never know what channel the question might help open up.

See you soon!