The Gesture

This story contains reference to suicide and mental illness.

It doesn’t take a tragedy. Not always.

Sometimes it’s a drip from a ceiling, a broken latch, a stranger’s disinterest. Sometimes it’s someone not saying thank you. Or the overly-happy music, forced out of supermarket speakers while you stand in front of nail clippers.

We think despair arrives in storms, but it slips in quietly—through the crawlspace, under the door.

We are all, at any given point, just one untraceable moment away from wondering whether we matter at all.

My mother once answered an advert calling for hospital volunteers. It was a psychiatric hospital seeking visitors—people to talk to patients who had little family or few friends. She was interviewed, vetted. Approved.

Then they said, “We think we have someone who would respond well to a visit from you.”

His name was John. He wasn’t what she’d expected. She’d braced for disorder: rumpled clothes, wild eyes, the clichés of distress. But he was tall, well-spoken, her age. Polite. If anything, too composed. His hands trembled slightly. So did hers.

He had once been a pilot. Then came the cancer. Testicular. Operated on, successfully, but something in him—his mind, his spirit—didn’t recover. He’d checked himself in when he realised he no longer trusted his will to survive.

They walked the grounds together. He told her about his widowed father in London, his younger brother in Hong Kong. They laughed. He told jokes. She told him about her children, her husband. After a few visits, they began to talk about him coming to the house for tea.

Then, on one of their walks, he stopped and said, “Will you lie down here in the grass with me? Just hold me. That’s all.”

My mother hesitated. He was a patient. She was alone. No witnesses. If I had been present, even as a young child, I’m pretty sure I would be pleading with her to get away at all costs. She knew - he was unstable, he was there to receive psychiatric care. He was bigger than her, a man with who knows what kind of intentions. But she said yes. Not because she understood—but because something about him, in the stillness, told her it was the right thing to do.

She lay beside him in the grass. Her head in the crook of his arm. Her hand on his chest. He didn’t speak. Nor did she. They just lay there. For twenty minutes. Then, wishing each other a good weekend, they went their separate ways.

On Sunday, John left the hospital and returned to his flat. That night, he killed himself.

When the hospital called her, the social worker was kind. She checked in more than once. Asked if she was alright.

She was. Just very sad.

She never talked about it much. She told me the story years later, when I was grown, perhaps because I was finally old enough not to ask the wrong questions.

I marvelled at her calm. At her lack of interpretation. She never spoke of guilt or responsibility—only of the gesture. That she did it. That in the moment, it felt right. That she couldn’t imagine refusing him.

She held him, and then he died. That doesn’t cancel the gesture. It consecrates it.

There are no “results” to kindness. There are only moments in which we rise to meet another human being and let that be enough.

I remember this when I think of a day in the supermarket. I was living alone in a shell of a house, sleeping next to a washing machine I couldn’t use, trying to manage an office job over dodgy Wi-Fi while fumbling instructions in bad French to builders who seemed to have their own agenda. My wife called from another country to say the support beam was in the wrong place, the electrics poorly thought out, the whole thing was being mismanaged. She wasn’t wrong.

It was raining. I hadn’t slept. The dog was muddy and my bed onto which she had jumped was wet before I could dry her dirty paws. My glasses were scratched. My French was worse than I thought.

In the supermarket, I looked at AA batteries and nail clippers while some dissonant anthem piped through the speakers. And for a moment, I felt completely invisible. That if I died right there, nobody would know. I imagined a news report—just a line: “Seen last browsing toiletries.”

I didn’t die. I walked out, in tears. I left the thought there, hovering near the cut-price cotton buds and supermarket-branded batteries. And I’ve never quite picked it up again.

That, too, was a gesture. Small. Unseen. But it counted.

We are all only a breath away from the edge. And all we can do—really—is be there for one another in the pauses. We lie in the grass. We walk out of the shop. We say yes. And if we're lucky, we carry on