A Letter 40 Years Later: What Mrs. Dolezal Remembered

More than forty years after we first met, Mrs. Dolezal sent me a letter shortly before she passed away. By then I had long since finished school, built a business with my twin brother, retired, and settled into a comfortable life. The years between us had quietly slipped away. As I read her letter, one passage stopped me in my tracks. "You are like a son for me. I shall never forget the kindness and strength you showed me after the devastating shock of my husband's death… You were a young man at the time but you took on a heroic task… I shall never forget what you did for me and my children." I sat there for a long time. For decades I had remembered the kindness the Dolezals had shown my family. I had remembered the jobs, the friendship and one particular Christmas Eve. I never imagined that Mrs. Dolezal had been carrying memories of me. Her letter transported me back to 1977. I had recently returned home from boarding school in England after seven years away. My twin brother Nick and I had left at age ten and returned just before our seventeenth birthdays. Not long after coming home, my mother sat us down and explained that my parents had separated. The news didn't upset me as much as it might have. Perhaps after years of growing up largely apart from my parents, I had already become emotionally independent. Or perhaps I simply had one challenge too many to process. Whatever the reason, my attention quickly turned to something more immediate. Money. My mother was suddenly faced with supporting three boys and my sister on her own. A Friday night trip to Roy Rogers was a luxury. If there was money left over, perhaps we could see a movie. She found work to tide us over, but she needed something with better pay and benefits. Nick and I did whatever work we could find. We delivered The Washington Post, waking at 5:30 each morning to finish our route before catching the school bus. We mowed lawns, babysat and accepted almost any odd job that came our way. One of those jobs came through a Czechoslovakian family named Dolezal. Mrs. Dolezal taught piano from her home while her husband, Mr. Dolezal, worked as a plumber. If I wasn't babysitting their children, I was helping around the house. Before long they became much more than people who gave me work. They became friends. Then came Christmas Eve. Our hot water heater failed. For most families it would have been an inconvenience. For ours, it felt like a crisis.Money was tight, and replacing a hot water heater wasn't in the budget. When Mr. Dolezal heard what had happened, he came to our house, replaced the hot water heater and refused to charge us for the labor. I thanked him profusely and thought little more about it. Only years later did I realize what he had really given us. It wasn't simply hot water. It was relief. It was one less burden for my mother to carry. I had no idea how quickly life would change for the Dolezals. Not long afterward, Mr. Dolezal died unexpectedly while working. He was still a young man. Mrs. Dolezal was suddenly left to raise her children alone. Looking back now, I see the parallel I couldn't appreciate then. My mother was trying to rebuild her life after the end of her marriage. Mrs. Dolezal was trying to rebuild hers after the sudden loss of her husband. Their circumstances were different, but both were suddenly carrying the weight of an entire family on their shoulders. I still remember walking into their home that day. Only days earlier it had been filled with piano lessons, children's laughter and the ordinary rhythm of family life. Now it was filled with disbelief. Friends and neighbors came and went, each trying to comfort a family whose lives had changed in an instant. I stayed until late that evening. Looking back, I don't remember finding the right words. I simply remember being there. As the funeral approached, I spent hours telephoning friends and members of the community, hoping to fill the church in honor of a man who had quietly touched so many lives. On the day of the funeral, I sat beside Mrs. Dolezal in the limousine and remained close throughout the service. She was a grieving wife and mother facing the unimaginable. At seventeen, I wasn't trying to do anything extraordinary. I simply wanted to help a family that had shown so much kindness to mine. Then life, as it always does, moved on. Only after reading Mrs. Dolezal's letter did I realize that while I had spent decades remembering a plumber who refused to charge for a hot water heater on Christmas Eve, she had spent those same decades remembering a teenager who simply showed up when her world fell apart. Her words reminded me of moments I had almost forgotten. She remembered the phone calls I made in the days before the funeral, hoping the church would be full for Mr. Dolezal. She remembered me sitting beside her throughout that painful day, creating, as she wrote, "a great sense of emotional stability." Then came the sentence that stopped me. "You were a young man at the time but you took on a heroic task." Reading her letter brought tears to my eyes. Not because she called me "like a son." Not because she thought I had "taken on a heroic task." But because I had never realized that what felt ordinary to me had become unforgettable to her. We spend much of our lives measuring wealth in dollars and cents. We follow our investment returns, account balances and net worth. Yet some of the greatest returns never appear on a balance sheet. Sometimes they come from an unexpected act of generosity. Sometimes they come from simply being present for another person. And sometimes they return to us decades later in the form of a letter, reminding us that while we remembered the kindness others showed us, they had quietly spent years remembering yours.

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