But I had spent five months watching this woman, and I knew things Sherry could not know from two states away over dutiful Sunday calls, and they came out of me in a rush.

That Enid did her own cooking and her own bills and knew every neighbor on the block.

That the stairs were manageable with one grab bar we could install for ninety dollars, and the basement laundry we could move to the main floor, and the pear tree we could hire the boy down the street to pick.

That the things she “couldn’t manage” were mostly things she was too proud to ask for help with, and that the answer to a proud person who won’t ask for help is not to take their whole life away — it is to be close enough, daily, that they don’t have to ask.

I believe that now more than almost anything, and I did not know I believed it until it came out of my mouth in a hospital corridor.