In late December 2013, a dear friend was taken to the emergency room with seizure like symptoms and diagnosed within a short time with a tumor of the brain. Not long after my first visit with him, I was given a prompt in a writer’s workshop to start some kind of piece with “I just wanted to help.” I wrote this, shared it with my friend’s wife (and my writing group), and then set it aside. Now, awaiting word of his final passing, in this insanely helpless period for all involved, I looked for it to post it here, as the only way to share this story right now, at a time I feel like sharing. The bottom line takes a while to get to, but has to do with the kind of help that’s needed in situations like these, when we’re unlucky enough to find it needing, and lucky or something enough to be able to offer it. With much love and sadness in my heart, this:

I just wanted to help.

It’s true.

But truer still: I wanted to stop feeling helpless. Immediately.

I desperately needed that feeling to go away.

We learned on Facebook, from his wife—first that our friend was in the ER with what looked like a stroke. Then that it was a brain tumor. Then that it was a glioblastoma, the one with tentacles that spread, and different cell types that cleverly escape treatment. The one that really can’t be stopped. Maybe slowed, but not stopped. The one that killed Teddy Kennedy (after only 15 months; I looked it up).

This particular tumor was lodged in a center of language in our friend’s brain, already causing problems. He is not a physically vigorous man, this friend. He might even be called frail, and is often at the mercy of physical ailments. But he is brilliant, and nothing if not verbal.

It was an entirely online revelation many of us experienced—following intermittent updates on Facebook; noting the irony of this friend’s verbal center being under attack, not his under-performing body, but his over-performing brain; and googling—googling madly—until realizing, each in our own time, that this was, really, a death sentence.

It took me a few googles longer than for others: doctors and researchers, friends who had already lost spouses to just this, who knew the timeline, who knew the options, who were already in direct touch, who could really be helpful, really helpful, right away.

The rest of us knew, or at least hoped, that we’d have our turn. That we’d get to see them and hug them, and, oh, please God, in some small way, help them. We could help now by giving them the time and space they needed. We could help by patiently waiting. But the wait, alone, was torture.

Thankfully, one close friend, in a notably helpful move, worked with them to set up an online system, inviting friends to sign up for visits and to respond to occasional calls for assistance.

How grateful I was to be able to offer myself up, not just for a visit, but for something specific and useful.

I thought I’d just be hanging out as he slept, while his wife ran to the doctor’s office for records… there only to assure he didn’t experience another seizure, like the one she’d had to witness when they got to the ER.

But he was awake when I arrived, and greeted me at the door with a hug.

After that hug, and mine with her before she left, I sat with him. He explained his condition, and I was relieved to see that—though he searched for words, and sometimes misspoke—he was him, my friend.  Still intact. Just dying.

He explained the next steps they were taking, why surgery wasn’t recommended, how long chemo and radiation might take, and what they would and wouldn’t consider trying.

He talked about the outpouring of love and warmth and regard from his community, and—most striking to him, it seemed—from his colleagues at work. He cried. He explained that the  condition, and drugs, made him more emotional. I told him he was allowed to be emotional.

He said he felt overwhelmed, and blessed, by that outpouring of love and support. I cried. I did. I tried to cover it up, but what I wanted to say, what I tried to say, is that he is blessed, because he is, has always been, a blessing. Of course his colleagues have held him in high regard. Of course they, and we—so many among us—are stunned, and heartbroken.

He said that he’d been blessed by 18 years with his wife. And then he cried some more.

“I’m not afraid for me,” he said. “I’m agnostic about what happens after death. I’ll either be gone, or on to something good.”

“I’ve had a good life,” said my 53-year-old friend.

“I’m worried for her….”  And we talked at length about the things that worried him, what he hoped for her, and how he hoped they’d spend their remaining time together. He ticked off possibilities, places they had never been, or places they’d loved and might return to while they could.

“You know, I could have died of a stroke that day,” he said.  I realized that it put things in perspective, for him. He’d been given a gift of time. A bit more time.

It put things in perspective for me, too.

He didn’t die that day.  If he’d died that day, his other friends and I wouldn’t have felt helpless; we’d have felt stricken by grief.  But he didn’t die that day. He’s dying now. And living, too.

We cannot help the way we’d really like to help. We cannot help him beat death.

But we can help him in his living, and his dying. And help her through it, and out the other side.