All three of my friends have dedicated their lives to serving others. Tim cofounded the Parish Collective, a network of hundreds of faith communities around the world who are collaborating with neighbors to weave a fabric of care in their neighborhoods. (Disclaimer: My wife is chairperson Parish Collective’s board chair.) Coté, a native of Chile, founded Puentes, a nonprofit that supports undocumented families in the Pacific Northwest. More recently, the two of them started Resistencia, a coffee shop and gathering place in South Park, their diverse Seattle neighborhood.

Within just a few hours of hearing about their accident in Mexico, friends launched a crowdfunding page to help pay for medical expenses and lost income. Because so little was known at that time about Coté and Tim’s conditions, a fundraising goal was pulled out of the air: $7,000. They raised that much in less than an hour. By the end of the day, tens of thousands of dollars had been given. Eventually more than $57,000 was donated, with an average donation of around $100. Friends, family, and neighbors who had been touched directly by Coté and Tim’s kindness seemed eager to give back, as did a few strangers who had been moved by stories they’d seen on social media or local news.

Crowdfunding efforts were just the tip of an iceberg of generosity. People volunteered to help with the kids and the dog and the house, help run errands, and just be a comforting physical presence in the hospital. Coté and Tim were released from the hospital and have now fully recovered.

Like Coté and Tim, Heather has devoted her life to others, not least of which through her work as a beloved kindergarten teacher and as our daughters’ summer babysitter for six years. The day after her collision, my wife and I saw Heather at a concert in Portland. She sat down next to us before the show and described the spiritual journey she’d been on over the previous 24 hours. Reflecting on the accident and its aftermath, she had started to see it with new eyes. It was a perspective I’m not sure I would have been capable of in her situation—almost certainly not a day after the accident.

Of course, Heather had been frustrated to lose her car. The car itself was going to be a hassle to replace, and potentially expensive too. (She was later gifted a car.) But what Heather grieved most was the loss of a physical reminder of 17 years of family memories and, more recently, the generosity of her community. Yet the family itself wasn’t lost. Nor was her community. In fact, the first paramedic to respond to the accident was an acquaintance from town. And within minutes of the crash she’d been able to call a friend to get a ride home. In contrast, the man who had hit her walked into town alone. By all appearances, he didn’t have anyone to call. Heather felt compassion for him.

Loneliness: The Greatest Disease

That same week I watched a show on PBS about the “giant thaw” that takes place every year in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The abrupt transition between Yellowstone’s long and brutal winter, and its hot and dry summer, is considered to be one of the most dramatic seasonal changes on the planet. In one scene, river otters were shown diving below the surface of the ice to catch fish. Because of how scarce food is at that time of year, hungry bald eagles swooped down to try to steal the fish. The family of otters (also called a bevy of otters, a raft of otters, or, my favorite, a romp of otters) were able to keep their food because they worked together. Some of the otters went into the river, while others stayed alert for thieving birds.

But there was also an otter who was alone. For whatever reason, he wasn’t part of the group. Malnourished and weak, he had trouble getting out of the river and onto the ice. Because he didn’t have a family member watching his back, every fish he caught was stolen by the eagles. In order to eat at all, he had to come back late at night. The filmmakers saw him through their night-vision lens, slipping from the bank onto the half-frozen river, his eyes glowing green, fishing by himself under the cover of darkness.