I read those messages sometimes, the ones the recipients send back, and they undo me every time, because I know exactly what the person on the other end is feeling, in a way that someone who has never lived it could not.

I know the particular disbelief of being helped when you have stopped expecting help.

I know what it is to have braced yourself to absorb another blow, to have already begun the grim arithmetic of which bill goes unpaid this month, and then to have a hand reach out of nowhere and simply take the weight.

It does something to a person that goes far beyond the money itself.

It tells them that they are not invisible after all, that someone, somewhere, saw them and counted them and decided they mattered.