10 Acts of Kindness Proving Heavy Hearts Can Still Find Room for Compassion and Happiness Right Now

My father was in hospital for three weeks and I spent most of that time in the car park between visits because I couldn’t sit in the waiting room for that many hours and couldn’t go home either. One afternoon a man knocked on my car window with a flask of tea and two cups. He said he’d noticed me there every day and that his wife was on the same ward. He’d learned in his first week that the car park was where you went when the waiting room got too small. He poured without asking if I wanted any. We sat on the bonnet of his car and drank tea in the cold and talked about everything except what was happening inside. I never learned his name. But those cups of tea in that car park were what got me through those three weeks.

I volunteer at a community center on Thursday evenings. A few months ago a man started coming in who never spoke to anyone, just sat in the corner with a cup of tea and watched. Nobody knew his name. Nobody pushed. One Thursday I sat down next to him with my own tea and didn’t say anything either. We sat in silence for about half an hour. As he was leaving he said, “Same time next week?” I said yes. He’s been coming 4 months now. Last week he told me his name. I didn’t make a thing of it. Neither did he. Some conversations take as long as they take.

My son went missing when he was 6. My husband blamed me and left. I worked nights for 11 years after that. I cleaned offices downtown after everyone else had gone home. I won’t go into the details of either. I just kept going.

Last month I was on the third floor of an office building, working my way through the desks around 1am, when I found a child’s drawing. The desk had that feel to it, crayons in the pen holder, a little chair pulled up next to the adult one, family photographs everywhere. Someone’s grandkid came in sometimes. The drawing was a person floating in a cloud with their arms open. At the bottom, in that wobbly way small children write, it said: “Grandpa in the sky will help me find my friend who moved away.”

I just stood there.

It’s a kid’s drawing. The grandfather is probably someone’s lovely retired dad who brings his grandchild to the office on Fridays. The friend probably moved to another suburb. There’s nothing mysterious about any of it. But I’d spent 11 years telling myself that lost things stay lost. And some kid had left a drawing on a desk I happened to be cleaning that night, about someone in a cloud with their arms open, completely certain that lost things can still be found.

I photographed it before I moved on. I still have it on my phone. I haven’t told anyone about it until now.

I was sitting on a bench outside a coffee shop in the rain because I’d missed my bus and had nowhere better to be. An older man sat down next to me. After a while he said his wife had passed six months ago and he’d started sitting on this bench because she used to buy her coffee here every morning and it made him feel close to her. He said he knew that was strange. I told him it didn’t sound strange at all. We sat together for about 40 minutes. I missed two more buses. When my bus finally came he said “thank you for sitting.” I said I hadn’t done anything. He said “that was the thing.”

It was cold and I passed a teenager on a wall in a thin hoodie, clearly freezing, waiting for someone. I stopped and asked if he was alright. He said he was fine. I took my coat off and put it next to him and said I had another one at the office. I did not have another one at the office. I went to work cold. Three weeks later I was in the same street and the coat was hanging on the railings outside the newsagent with a note pinned to it that said: “Thank you, left this in case you needed it back.” I put it on and walked to work warmer than I’d been in weeks.

My neighbor grows tomatoes every summer like it’s his life’s work. His wife passed two winters ago and last summer he planted twice as many as usual. I asked him why. He said she’d always told him his tomatoes were the best thing about summer and he was going to keep planting them in case she was right and someone somewhere could still tell. He gave me a bag every week from July to September. In October he knocked with the last of the season in a bowl and said, “She would have been pleased with this year.” I told him she would have been right. He nodded and went home and I stood in my doorway holding a bowl of tomatoes feeling like something important had just been handed to me.

My uncle called me on a random Wednesday evening for no reason he could articulate. Said he’d just been thinking about me. We talked for two hours about nothing urgent, old family stories, a holiday we’d both been on 20 years ago that we remembered completely differently. When we hung up I realized it was the first proper conversation I’d had in weeks that wasn’t about a task or a deadline. Three days later I called my cousin for the same reason. She picked up and said, “I was just thinking about you.” I don’t know what it says about how we live now that a phone call with no agenda felt like the most generous thing anyone had done for me in months. I’m trying to make it less rare.

My neighbor lost his son two years ago. They had been close, the kind of close that makes a house feel different after. His wife passed 8 months later. He was 81, living alone, his remaining family scattered across the country and not particularly present. I had known him for years, knew his son well, and I lived close by so I just started showing up. Cleaned his gutters a few times a year. Stopped in to share stories about the old neighborhood, the ones his son used to be part of. He was a proud man, not given to emotion, the kind of man who had lived through hard things and considered showing feeling a form of weakness. One afternoon I was leaving and he put his arm around me and pulled me close and said “You’re like a son to me.” He was crying. I had never seen him cry before. I stood there not knowing what to do with my hands. He had spent his whole life keeping people at arm’s length and he used what might have been one of his last easy afternoons to let one person in. I have cleaned those gutters every season since and I always will.

I found a handwritten note inside a library book last year. Not a bookmark. A proper note addressed to whoever borrowed it next. It said: “This book got me through the hardest year of my life. I hope it finds you when you need it. You are not alone in whatever you’re carrying.” I sat in the library for a long time after reading it. I found it on a Thursday afternoon when I genuinely needed to hear that someone had survived their hardest year. I left my own note inside before returning it. It said: “It did. Thank you.” I hope they somehow know.

An older woman was at a bus stop in the rain with two heavy bags and no umbrella. I had one so I stopped and held it over her. She said her bus wasn’t for 25 minutes and I should go. I said I wasn’t in a hurry, which wasn’t entirely true. We stood together and she told me about her daughter who called every Sunday and how those calls were the thing she looked forward to most all week. Her bus came. She picked up her bags, turned around and said, “You remind me of someone good.” She got on before I could ask who. I’ve thought about that for months. It felt like the finest thing anyone had said to me in years.