Ninety-some people needed me to come.

Emmitt needed his five minutes.

The whole scattered string of them out there were counting on me to thread through their day, and on the mornings I could not have gotten up for myself, I got up for them.

I have thought a great deal, in the years since, about what that means — that the thing which saved me was being needed, that the cure for my own grief turned out to be other people’s need of me.

It is not a fashionable idea.

We are told to heal ourselves first, to put on our own oxygen mask, to find our worth inside and not in what we do for others, and I understand why people say it, because you can lose yourself in serving too, can hide from your own life inside other people’s.