Small gestures are not always small gestures.

Small gestures are often the gestures that make the difference. I want to share a story about how one of my friends helped me in, one of the most challenging walks I have gone through.

I recently lost my Grandfather in December of 2020, and his funeral was a week before Christmas. This loss has been the most challenging loss I have ever endured. This last couple of weeks have been some of the most painful and challenging weeks I have had, in my life. Adjusting to my new world. My Grandfather was my oldest best friend, and I spent so much of my life around him. He would be the most influential and wise man I have known in my life, and one of the most amazing people I know. He was my rock and a person I used to confide in all the time. I had spent a vast amount of my childhood around him and a fair bit of my adult life as well. In particular, the last couple of years have been spent helping him and my Grandmother.

Last year in 2020 his needs significantly increased to the point where my darling partner Tim and I were visiting very regularly. This was to help my mum and Grandmother look after Granddad, and was something that we were quite happy and willing to do. But it also significantly impacted our lives. My grandparents live eleven hours away, one-way. Last year, Tim and I journeyed almost monthly to help them do things they needed and support them. We would help them with, mowing lawns, fixing taps, driving them downtown to appointments and everything in between. At the end of this, we would then turn around and drive the eleven hours back to where we live. I used up all of my leave from last year and most of my work leave for 2021. But I would not change a thing.

We were so blessed to have other family members that lived closer and further away who also came to help my grandparents. I feel so blessed to have a large family that helps each other in the ways they can. However, I want to use this writing challenge to honor my friend Kerry and share what she did for me after my Grandfather passed away. To celebrate her friendship by sharing, the story of the small “gestures” she has blessed me with, in my life over the last month. I am sure to some people these gestures are small, but they were my saving grace to me. I honestly could not have got through this month without her.

Helen Keller famously said, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched — they must be felt with the heart.” This is so very true for my friendship with Kerry, I have known her for about five or six years now, but she has become part of my non-biological family. In the week, of my grandfather passing and the funeral; I honestly found the meaning of Helen Keller’s quote in my dear friend. I have always had such a great love for my Kerry, but the week Granddad died, I felt it. The week he died, Kerry was one of the very few people even in my own family, that had called or texted every day, to see how I was going. Not needing a response, just making sure I was doing ok. That was indeed so beautiful because there was no pressure to respond back, but I could feel the genuineness through those calls and texts, that were just filled with care and love.

When the time came to go down with Tim and be with my family before the funeral and after. I asked Kerry if she could look after my cat, feed her, and look after my house while I was away. She never even flinched when she agreed to do so.

Kerry is one of the busiest people I know, she works full-time. She still managers most of her regular mother duties around the home. She is a provisional psychologist who is always doing vast amounts of work around this area and is involved in many community projects. Somehow, she still made time to look after my cat, and check on my home while I was away. She would send me a“proof of life” photo every second day, which was utterly unnecessary. I know she would be great at looking after my cat Narla. However, it was super cute, looking at her children playing with Narla and having a great time. These photos also just reassured me that life at home was ok.

I thought that was the most generous gesture just knowing my house and Narla were safe. But then I got home and found she had gone out shopping and bought me, some food items, and had restocked all my cat food entirely, both the wet and dry food. There had been enough for that week and the week when I got home, but she had gone out and brought enough cat food to last to the new year. My eyes quickly filled with tears. She had looked around my house for anything that would need buying in the week I was home, after the funeral and restocked those things. This saved me from having to do the grocery shopping. I thought about the shopping on the drive home, and how much I was dreading it. She had even cleaned out Narla’s litter box and additionally done some cleaning around the house.

Then I went outside and realized my washing had been done too. I rang Kerry to thank her for all she had done. She had taken it home and folded it for me. She had also taken the washing, left in the basket to wash back to her house, washed them, and dried them there. Due to her not knowing how to use my washing machine, they were just waiting for me at her home all folded. Of course, she wanted no money for the grocery shop.

I thanked her and organised a time to collect the washing, which she asserted to be the next day or so, to allow both Tim and I some rest. I then hung up the phone in tears. I think I sobbed for a good twenty minutes, after. My beautiful friend had no idea just how much this collection of “small gestures” as she called them actually change my whole week. I was so overwhelmed and burnt out from the funeral. Leading up to the funeral, I was the same and had been for weeks. I was emotionally, physically, mentally drained in every way. Upon returning home to find the things, I had missed completing before the funeral, because I had run out of time. Was just overwhelming, because the drive home had been so long, and I was so tired.

Tim and I had left at about four in the morning and arrived home at four that afternoon. We both were completely exhausted. Tim was worried about helping me with all the things I had waiting for me at home, but he was equally as tired as me. The day before we came home, Tim and my brother in law, Brad had been cleaning the gutters, for my Grandmother. Tim and Brad had also helped my Uncle Matt, set up a self-watering system for Grandmother’s garden. They had done this to assist my Grandmother while she visited relatives over Christmas. Instead of both Tim and I trying to work out how to fit in all the things missed, we now had time to rest, thanks to Kerry’s kindness.

Tim is a farmer who is part of a family farming business, that owns many farms and properties. He starts work on average at four or five o’clock in the morning and often does not finish until seven or eight o’clock at night, and this is on a good day. I work part-time as a program coordinator at St Vincent De Paul, organizing home, and garden maintenance and travel for elderly people over sixty-five. Then outside of that, I work part-time as a life coach and am still studying; while still helping both Tim and my parents on their separate farms. Tim too, had used up all of his leave in 2020, to just travel with me and help me look after my grandparents. I am genuinely grateful for Tim and, how he supports, cares, and helps me.

You can imagine after the long drive home and the collection of fatigue from our busy lives, with the combination of the passing of Granddad, how emotionally spent, we were. We had no idea how we were going to get all the things done. But to return home, to find it all done, and that now both Tim and I could rest. It was just truly overwhelming. It was the hugest weight off both our shoulders, and now we could just catch up on some sleep and rest. Even Tim was a little glassy-eyed upon learning what Kerry had done for us.

I am seldom speechless, but I was silent on this afternoon. I am blessed to have really great friends in my life. Kerry had been already so deeply loved by me; but now she had just taken her love to a level I actually have no words for. I can not describe how much she means to me as a person. When I think I can not get any more from this lady, Kerry regularly does something like this, making her more unique and more loved. Not only does she challenge me and grow me all the time. She is one of the most incredible supporters in my life coaching career and every other area in my life, and I know she truly cares for me.

She brings to my life this joy and love that makes my life beautiful. Showing me every day how to be a loving person. I look up to her so much, she is so wonderfully humble and wise beyond her years. She is also an excellent source of inspiration for me and how we should do life as a person who, really, has become part of my adopted family.

I will remember Kerry’s “small” gestures around this time of my Grandfather passing for the rest of my life. They were so great and profound to me. They are a great source of encouragement, as to how to go about this world. I find the negative trajectory of the wider world itself very disheartening. But when we can have these little memories of “small” gestures to look back on, it does make the world sadness seem much less. I wanted to share this story, to encourage others to think about Kerry’s example and how we can do the same. Give back, to your fellow humans and love fiercely. Together, if we all love and look after one another a bit better, and build each other up, our future can be just so much brighter. Look for chances to be a Kerry. Look to do good to others, never discredit those small kind gestures, you feel led to do for someone. You just don’t know how big they are and how much they will mean for years to come.

Written by Emma White