Okay. I’m a proud person. A fiercely independent proud person, who hates asking for help and doesn’t often accept help unless I’m drowning. However, almost every message or visit comes with a phrase ‘let us know what we can do to help’ or ‘do you need anything?’ or ‘what can we do?’ I’m never sure how to answer that, because answering became another thing to think about. Knowing what we need requires thought and some time to figure it out, my brain and heart are so full dealing with a kajillion other things that delegating just seems more difficult than it should. Add that to my pride and all those offers of help fall to the wayside.
Most my friends know this about me, so our closest people just show up. They make it easy, so we don’t have to ask. That worked really well when it was a visit at the hospital, taking us to dinner, visiting on Christmas Day with Christmas food, bringing clean clothes or collecting the mail. But as time has gone on and more people heard about our story, and the outpouring of love has been immense… and more people started just sending stuff.
We have so much food. We’re drowning in it. I should mention the hospice feeds us three meals plus cake and snacks every day – so for people to send us more food on top of that is crazy. One of Sam’s friends was so so generous and sent us boxes and boxes of wet wipes and muslins and bibs (thanks John!).
That’s more stuff than we could ever use, so we’ve donated the lions share to the hospice. It was then that we realised that people were going to send things whether we asked or not, and it might be better to direct the goodwill into helpful directions.
So, we set up a page: How to Help.
I feel weird asking for help, or even having a page with things on it. However, there are a few things that would be more helpful than the copious amounts of food we keep receiving, so. We have page, with help requests.
So much love to everyone for the offers of help. If you decide that you do want to help, please don’t send food. Pick something small off the list if you feel moved to. We appreciate every small action, and offer of help, so thank you. Thank you to everyone who has sent a message of love, who has sent food, and who has been there. We love you guys. We can’t imagine getting through something like this without you guys.
x
