There’s a common assumption that when people struggle to ask for help it’s because of pride—that they are too independent to admit they can’t do everything by themselves.

After spring break, a priest and fellow teacher with few remnants of the full head of hair he once had returned to school fitted with a toupee. When we all saw him for the first time, we couldn’t help but let our eyes travel right up to his new hairline.

It was a scenario that is all too common. Routine tests to prepare me for simple cataract surgery found me sitting in a doctor’s office being told that cancer that I had been treated for had returned in the form of a tumor on my bladder.

As a young girl, she always tried to avoid getting drafted to work in her mother’s garden. She disliked the planting, the pruning, the watering. She disliked the weeding the most. And so she would rush off to play with her friends.

When my previously confident, vivacious 16-year-old daughter developed an eating disorder, our entire family was plunged into a frightening underworld. Darkness descended in the form of psychotic episodes, suicidal ideation, hospitalizations, and her paranoid conviction that we were conspiring to hurt her instead of help her.

In 1999 everyone thought that the world would end with the beginning of the year 2000 because of the Y2K “millennium bug” that threatened everything run by computers.

At the age of 21, Ray became the first African American elected to represent my city on my county’s commission. He ran against a politically experienced and divisive candidate, and no one thought Ray would win. But Ray did win—by three votes.

They were parishioners I had gotten to know well. After Mass, they stopped and asked me if I had ever seen the birth of a child. I hadn’t. I had just been with a dear friend of mine when he died surrounded by his family in his rectory room.

The day of my uncle’s funeral was met with many surprises.

Homesickness is a powerful disease for which there is no cure but going home. We may miss our own room or bed. Maybe we need the routine that we have grown accustomed to over the years