"Everybody has something noble inside of them waiting to get out. If you catch them at the right time, you'll see this to be true. At other times, people are less noble and heroic. When the media spotlights one individual over another as a hero, they're simply showing the goodness that's in all of us. In other words, we're all heroes if you catch us at the right moment."

From the movie "Hero."

Today I received a letter from a woman who I used to know when I was working with Alzheimer’s patients in 2006. Her mother was a patient at the hospital I worked at, and a very difficult patient at that. Even still, I always tried to keep in mind that she had been ravaged by a terrible disease that had likely drastically altered her personality. Some days I was better at remembering this than others.

This woman had a daughter who was exceedingly difficult to deal with. This is the woman who wrote me today. She would come to the hospital at all hours barking out orders to the staff, and would hover over her mother to no end. We dreaded when she came to visit, which was often, and, because I was the Activity Director I was the one that often had to deal with her the most.

I tried my best. She was terribly impatient, had awful listening skills, and talked in a loud voice that induced anxiety in virtually everyone she spoke to. I considered it a personal challenge to try and calm her down, but often she was inconsolable. I learned from her brother that she had been through a divorce recently and that she had a very strained relationship with her mother for most of her life. I had more compassion for her when I found this out, and tried my very best to listen to her despite her difficult personality. Over time we got to a point we could talk at a much calmer and slower pace, and she used to bring me candy sometimes during Christmas and Easter other holidays.

One day when she was particularly harried, she really overstayed her welcome, and I turned to my partner and said, “thank God the bitch is gone.” She wasn’t. She was standing right behind me.

The look on her face was one of the saddest things I had ever seen. I was one of the only people in the world that listened to her, and I could tell by the look on her face that I had broken her heart. I went home that day feeling as low as I ever had in my life..

As time went on she came by less and less..I tried hard to explain I had just had a bad day, but trust had been badly damaged. As the months passed, I did my best to listen and try and understand her, and very slowly she began to soften. Our relationship was much better, and I often found myself talking to her about her relationship with her mother, and how much I admired her dedication towards her mom now that she needed her the most. We had several long talks during those months, and over time even developed a kind of friendship.

So today I received a letter from this woman telling me that her mother had died. Although she was sad about this, she was writing me for another reason. She wanted to say that I had helped her get through the most difficult time in her life. That she felt so disgusted with herself during this period of her life that she had contemplated suicide, and that her visits to the nursing home were at times the only thing that kept her going. She said she was happily remarried now, and that she truly felt like a different person than she was when I had known her. In short she wrote to say thank you. It was a thank you I’m not sure I deserved, but wow did it make me stop and think.

I guess the lesson is this. Everything we say and do is important, especially when we are in positions when we see people at their most vulnerable. When you see a person who is extremely difficult to deal with, it’s likely this person is deeply hurt and they have no other way to deal with it than to take it out on the world. We have all BEEN this difficult person at one time or another in our lives. We didn’t always know the things we know now. It took some falling down, some broken hearts, some time and reflection to get here.. And we’re still going to fall a bunch more times. One day we make look back at the things we know today and be amazed by how little we really knew and how much we have grown and changed. It’s something I hope I can remember. Truthfully I had totally forgotten about this woman, and today was a cosmic reminder that our words and actions ripple much, much deeper than we ever truly comprehend….