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My daughter is about to turn 20 years old.

For two decades, I have marveled at my own good fortune, at this human we made, at how big a human heart can grow.

“In the end,” the late, beautiful poet Andrea Gibson wrote, “I want my heart to be covered in stretch marks.”

Yes. That.

I could go on (and on), but I’ll save it for her birthday card. Suffice it to say, I have spent 20 years trying to live up to the privilege of being her mom — 16 of those years with the added privilege of raising and loving her brother.

A few weeks before my daughter was born, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. I spent the early days of my maternity leave devouring the news coverage and sobbing inconsolably from what, in hindsight, I recognize as postpartum depression.

But something else was also at play. Something happened to my lens when I became a mother, where I suddenly saw everyone as someone’s child, or someone’s parent, or someone’s true love.

And all of a sudden the world seemed beautiful and mind-blowing and magical and also, really cruel. Because all those hearts out there walking around meant, also, all those hearts walking around breakable.

I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a better system in place.

I want to be clear that I know you don’t need to be a parent to have this understanding. You certainly don’t need to have kids to care about others.

But for me, it took becoming a mother to see how beautiful and fragile all of this is.

For me, it took becoming a mother to understand: We are the system in place.

The system feels a little shaky right now. My faith in the system feels a little shaky right now.

But here’s the thing: We’re all we’ve got.

Yes, we need good leaders. Yes, we need strong safety nets. Yes, we need humane public policies. But we need each other to elect those good leaders and advocate for those safety nets and fight for those humane public policies.

And we need to actually care about each other before we’ll do any of that.

Here’s another thing: I have a job — this column — that lets me go in search of people who actually care about each other, and who show us what it’s like to put that care into action.

And I have never had trouble finding them.

In 2017, I wrote a column about a woman named Kim MacNeill, who lost her son, Ross, to a brain tumor when he was 11 years old. She started a foundation to fund pediatric brain tumor research, and we stayed in touch over the years.

A few years later, in 2021, I wrote a column about Jason Patera, who worked as head of school for the Chicago Academy for The Arts. Patera had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, and my column was about his students rallying around him in the kindest, most hopeful ways. He was particularly moved by a student named Lila.

Lila had also been through cancer surgery — lots of cancer surgeries, in fact. And Patera said that before he went into his surgery, Lila gave him the stuffed penguin that she takes with her into every surgery. We published a photo with my column of Patera and Lila standing together at Lila’s graduation.

A few days after that column ran in the newspaper, I got a text from Kim MacNeill.

Her son was Lila’s best friend. Ross gave Lila that stuffed penguin — the one she gave to her principal to take with him to brain tumor surgery.

We’re all connected.

Sometimes not by something as clear cut as a stuffed penguin. Sometimes by grief. Sometimes by joy. Sometimes just by a desire to help.

Last year I wrote about a real estate agent named Brad Zibung who was riding the bus to see a play about immigration when he noticed a family of immigrants trying to navigate directions in a language they didn’t speak. He followed them off the bus and helped them find their shelter and stayed in touch with them. He ended up finding them a house to rent. And a job for the dad. And coats for the kids.

For three years running, I’ve written about a card-writing campaign launched by Carolyn Pinta to make sure people in the LGBTQ+ community, many of whom have been shunned by their families, get mail during the holidays. By the end of 2024, Pinta and her kindness army had sent out more than 35,000 cards to folks across the United States, Canada, England, India and more.

Last September, I wrote about a group of middle school kids who threw a surprise, schoolwide 47th birthday party for teacher Kathie Howe after learning she never had one as a kid.

In 2019, I wrote about Robert King, who was driving home from work when traffic on Lake Shore Drive slowed to a crawl. He saw a mangled vehicle off to the side and pulled over to see if anyone needed help.

One of the men asked him for a ride to the hospital, and King said sure. The man, it turned out, was a surgeon. He placed a box inside King’s trunk.

The mangled vehicle was an organ transplant vehicle. And that box held a liver, a kidney and a pancreas that this surgeon had just saved from a deceased donor in Blue Island. He had less than an hour to transplant them into patients who were prepped and waiting at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

King got them there.

He was honored by Jesse White a few days after our interview, and I asked if he was excited to meet the secretary of state. They’d already met, he told me. Jesse White was his gym teacher back in the day.

We’re all connected.

Sure, I do this for a living. Of course I’m going to stumble onto connections. Of course I’m going to find helpers.

But we all do this for a living.

We all walk around sharing this Earth with each other for a living.

This is living.

You don’t need a column to strike up a conversation with someone. Or look for the good in someone. Or understand that someone’s fate is linked to your fate.

We can also choose that as a living.

And that’s not everything. But it’s a start.

©2025 Tribune News Service. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.