From Hidden Brain Media, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is my unsung hero, stories where one person reached out to help another in a time of need.

My story is about a group of unsung heroes.

He just pulled up a chair, and we talked, I'd say for about 90 minutes.

I don't know if she really understands or appreciates the full impact that she's had in my life and still continues to have.

Today's story comes from Eric Schwartz.

In 1977, when Eric was 15 years old, his mother took her own life.

The loss was unexpected and devastating.

A few days later, Eric's father decided to take him and his older brother from their small hometown in New York State to Florida for a week.

My dad thought it was the right place to go to get away from any reminder of my mom or

anybody that we knew in town just to kind of regroup and recover and kind of figure out

what was next.

But eventually I had to go back to school.

And it was awkward.

I mean, everybody knew in town what had happened,

and I wasn't really excited to go back to school. I didn't want to talk about it. I think it's

awkward too for teachers when they encounter a student who had lost a parent, but especially

awkward, I think in my case, because of the way my mother had died.

So most teachers that day really didn't say anything.

And again, I wasn't surprised, and frankly, I really wasn't interested in having a conversation about it at the time.

That all changed when I went into chorus practice with Dr. V, who was, that's how he was known.

So it's a bunch of people standing in a room in chorus practice, and at the end, you have to file out through a set of double doors that are sitting next to the piano where he was seated.

...