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.

Hi Shanker, my En sank hero is a Frenchman.

She had given me exactly what I needed in that time.

I was fortunate enough to survive with the help of this man, this doctor, who went out of his way to help save my life.

Today's story comes from Molly Baker. In March 2018, Molly lost her husband Marlin in a skiing accident.

She was devastated. In the first few weeks after his

death, her community provided a lot of support. But after a while, the cards and

meals started to slow down.

People have, you know, families come into town and families left,

people have to get back to their jobs, people have to get back to their normal life,

and so things kind of drop off. I had a dear friend of mine,

Carla Vale, who came up with this idea that maybe she could set up a calendar of sorts that would assign people a particular day.

And what that looked like for them was that on that day they would reach out to me in some tangible way, maybe via text, maybe a phone call,

maybe a card, they would drop off a card, maybe they would drop some chocolates or something

off of my door. It didn't have to be anything big.

And then also for me, I could look at the calendar. I was given the names and so I could look at

the calendar and be like, oh, it's the sixth today and so-and-so's assigned.

And I could reach out to them as well

if I needed some emotional support or just needed something like maybe I needed them to run an errand for me or you know if that was possible

So it worked both ways a lot of people are really really uncomfortable around grief and loss.

And so what they do is instead of doing something,

they just do nothing and they don't say anything.

...