The Phone Call You Dread

Two days ago, I heard some bad news. The sort that starts with a phonecall, moves on to pacing, morphs into more phonecalls, scrambled packing and a last minute flight and ends with a bewildered arrival under the unforgiving lights of a hospital hundreds of miles away.

Unfortunately, it is a chain of events I’m sure many of you know well.

I won’t go into details, since not everyone lives online. However, I just wanted to take the chance to say thank you.

Thank you to the kind lady who sat next to me on the flight, whose actions made life that bit easier despite her having two young children to juggle. Thank you to the hotel staff, so helpful and kind in their last minute dealings. Thank you to the swarms of doctors, nurses, radiographers, porters, cleaners, cooks, paramedics, and lab staff who work every single night in unappreciated tiredness to make sure that when someone is ill, there is someone there to help them.

Thank you to every citizen who decided that paying taxes to care for the sick is a worthy thing to do.

Thank you for all the offers of help from friends far away, for the understanding shown by business partners and the patience I’ve received so freely.

Our papers and headlines carry words of fear and hate, war and competition, riots and greed and biting, bullying criticism. Yet each day also ushers in thousands of acts of unsung kindness, noticed – perhaps – by one person only in this six billion strong world.

I am so grateful I cannot really put it into words.

Thank you to my friends and family for help and support above and beyond the level of duty.

And above all, thank you to the person at the heart of this story, whose lifetime of unsung kindness forms a rhythm and a baseline that I cannot imagine being without.

I’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming soon enough – thankfully.

In the meantime, I found this quote when searching along the theme of gratitude:

The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you. ~John E. Southard

Thank you.