For Alena

Sometimes the only thing you can do is make a story of it.

This is the story of Alena.

My husband and I arrived in Copenhagen one early afternoon last spring. A taxi dropped us off in front of what we thought was our airbnb apartment. But it wasn’t. We were jetlagged, over-luggaged, sweaty (it was an astonishing 70 degrees), cranky. And lost. I traipsed back and forth in front of a long line of sleek canal-side apartments checking addresses and names, not finding our place, becoming increasingly distraught.

Then a woman called to us from a second-floor balcony. She had a cloud of blond hair and a larger-than-life smile. “Can I help? Are you lost?” Yes. And yes.

She raced downstairs and began to fuss over us. Her English was quick and charming. She would help us find the apartment, she said, but she would not hear of us standing on the sidewalk while things got straightened out. She helped us lug our luggage up to her place. She poured us tall glasses of water. She made us coffee. She offered us food. She lent us her phone. She was spontaneously, gloriously, unself-consciously generous.

Finally we connected with our host and found the apartment. A few days later, we invited Alena over for dinner to thank her. She refused and instead invited us to her apartment where, at the end of a long day of work, she prepared an extraordinary multi-course meal. I remember these tiny, impossibly creamy little potatoes. I remember enough fresh salmon, perfectly prepared, to feed the entire neighborhood. We brought dessert from Lagkagehuset, tiny, beautiful works-of-art pastries. We had to catch a flight in the early morning, but we stayed late, very late, eating and talking, talking and laughing.

When we got back home, I told everyone about Alena and how she was what I would remember most about our week in Copenhagen. I sent her a scarf in a shade of blue that I thought would match her eyes. We emailed back and forth for several months. Her written English was impossibly quirky and very funny. I loved hearing from her. Late last summer, she told me she was suffering from depression, and nothing was helping. This was territory she knew well, she said. It would pass, she said. I sent her a silly card. Twice a week I emailed what I hoped were encouraging thoughts. Then, mid-fall, she stopped answering.

This morning an email arrived from a woman who introduced herself as Alena’s best friend. She told me that last week Alena took her own life.

So this is a sad story, and maybe not a story you want to hear at the holidays (or ever), and certainly not a story that has to do with counterclockwise advice. So you are wondering why I am telling it.

I am telling it because I have to, because, in telling it, I am honoring Alena. I am telling it because I want to make it into a story not about death but about generosity of spirit and the way we touch each other’s lives, about moments of connection and how they stay with us, how they live on. Even though we don’t.