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.
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.
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.
An audio version of this essay, read by the author, is available here.
Elizabeth Beggins is a communications and outreach specialist focused on regional agriculture. She is a former farmer, recovering sailor, and committed over-thinker who appreciates opportunities to kindle conversation and invite connection. On “Chicken Scratch,” a reader-supported publication hosted by Substack, she writes non-fiction essays rooted in realistic optimism. To receive her weekly posts and support her work, become a free or paid subscriber here.
