The small and immeasurably large kindnesses of those who understand.

Because we are hounded incessantly by telemarketers, I usually don’t answer the phone during the day. I made an exception the other morning. It was a sales call. Soon afterwards, the phone rang again soon. As if I hadn’t learned my lesson six minutes beforehand, I made another exception.

It was Camille, an old friend of Gilles who I don’t know very well. The first time I met her was last year, at a concert – Gilles and I ran into her by chance – and I couldn’t follow any of the conversation, my French comprehension skills being, at that time, best-suited to library-quiet surroundings. The second time was in August when she came over to our flat to show me some decoration ideas for our upcoming wedding celebration in Switzerland. Gilles was at work; it was just the two of us.

I had served lunch and we had begun to talk, to peel back the layers beneath the most basic of introductions. Within minutes, she had told me she’d recently had a miscarriage. The first impression that crossed my mind was the strangeness of hearing this from somebody who I essentially didn't know. The second, and, oh, I’ve paid for this in spades, was that although I was very sorry for her, I couldn’t – and wouldn’t – properly empathize because I knew it could never happen to me. I was safe, smug even, in that knowledge.

(Let’s all take a moment to laugh ruefully at my arrogant complacency.)

She had called this day because she happened to be in the neighborhood and had some wedding-related things of ours that she could drop if, if I would like. And because she was wondering how I was doing – Gilles had told her, cryptically, that I’d had some health problems.

“Oh,” I began. “Well. I have been thinking of you, actually … and of what you told me when you came here for lunch. Because the same thing has happened to us.”

I could hear her compassion through the line. She said she’d be there in fifteen minutes, and she was, with a hug and a smile and a bouquet of spring flowers, pinks and purples and oranges to push back the darkness of our shared sorrows. She listened. She spoke. She commiserated. She shared her experience and her reflections and her advice and gave me the name of her gynecologist. “He’s wonderful,” she said, sketching out a rough map of his office.

So is she. I am touched and grateful and encouraged and so very pleased to have found this friendship among the litters of our lost hopes.