The GoFundMe C.E.O. Wants You to Ask: ‘How Can I Help?’
A few years ago, I was helping out my family. It was an unusual experience for me, and I think most of us have had that experience: we do some good work and then some of the good work is done. You spend time with a loved one who has a terminal condition that you never imagined might be your own and then your life is forever changed. Time heals, and it was that last moment in that hospital room that changed everything. This kind of person is the kind of person I like to help, and my wife, who never wanted me to help people, got exactly what she wanted, and that’s a very good thing.
A few years later, after an unfortunate incident, my wife and I were on our way home from the airport. We were en route to a conference, and I had the best job I’ve ever had, and my wife was at her strongest job. I was proud of my work, and she was equally proud of her work. I had never met somebody like her before. She never had any reason to be proud of her job, and as soon as she got back to work, the bad stuff started to happen. She came home and told me that, once again, I’d been a lousy provider and that I was an asshole. I told her she was wrong, and that this time the bad stuff happened to me and not to her. We talked through it, and we had a good talk about what happens when people stop giving and start taking. We laughed together about some of the terrible things people do when they get hurt – and then we both stopped.
A week later we were in the middle of a divorce (more on that in a second), a process that neither of us wanted. My wife had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I had to work through the grief of it and the anger of it, and what I didn’t expect was the support I got from others who loved my wife deeply enough to say, ‘We love you so much and we’re going to help you through this too.”
My wife was an incredible person, and she was an amazing wife. She gave me a place to stay when my car