JILL BITNER: Not Much. Never Suppress a Generous Thought

It was a Wednesday morning. Nothing unusual. My husband was at work, my kids were at school, and I was at my dining room table working on my laptop when my phone rang.

“Hi, Jill. This is Anne. Are you home?”
“Yep.”
“Can I stop by?”

I didn’t know Anne well. She and I attended the same church, and her two teenage sons came to the early morning scripture class I taught. I assumed that’s what Anne’s visit was about. I went back to work, and a few minutes later, through the window, I saw Anne approaching my door. I opened it before she could ring the bell.

“Oh!” She stepped back, clearly surprised. “Hi.”
“Hi, Anne. What’s up?”
“I, uh…” She thrust a bouquet of flowers at me. “I brought you these.”
Now it was my turn to be surprised.
“Oh!” I said. “How nice!”

She shuffled her feet and seemed to have a hard time looking directly at me.

“I, uh, I’vebeen thinking of you lately, and I kept thinking I ought to bring you flowers, but I didn’t. But the feeling wouldn’t go away, so today I just did it.”
She blushed and pushed the flowers at me again. “So, here.”
I took them. “Thanks.”
“They’re not much, but whatever. Sorry.”

With that, she was gone, practically running back to her minivan. I found a vase for the flowers and set them next to my laptop. They were simple, the kind sold at any grocery store, but they were cheerful, and they looked beautiful. A few times that morning, I paused and thought about how sweet Anne was, but really, I didn’t give them much thought beyond that.

Until, about two hours later, when my phone rang again. This time, I looked at the caller, and my heart stopped. It was my surgeon, who just a week before had removed the suspicious lymph node under my arm.

“Hi, Jill,” she said. I didn’t like her somber tone. “Your biopsy came back.”
“Okay…”
“It’s positive. Metastatic melanoma. I’m so sorry.”

She went on to explain that the cancer I’d fought twelve years ago had reappeared, spreading through my lymphatic system and probably growing in other places throughout my body. That I needed more tests, a specialized oncologist, and aggressive treatment. My life as I knew it was about to change—maybe forever. And through it all, I stared at a bunch of flowers, brought to me by a woman who thought she was super lame to do so.

A wise person, Camilla Kimball, once said, “Never suppress a generous thought.” Or, in the words of my equally wise friend Rose Marie, “sometimes it’s scary to reach out. do it anyway. you can throw up later.”

I don’t know if Anne threw up. Maybe. It’s possible. But during the worst ten minutes of my life, her flowers reminded me I wasn’t alone.

Jill Bitner loves reading, writing, and crushing everyone in word games. She has four children and lives with her dreamy husband under the big Texas sky.