Although I have a good primary-care physician here at home, I am under the care of two other doctors, a podiatrist and an endocrinologist, in New York City. They are as different as different can be and, from my point of view, represent the best that can be found with or without insurance coverage.

I decided to see the foot doctor after reading, by chance, a Wall Street Journal story that mentioned him and said he didn’t believe in surgery. I was referred to the endocrinologist after the results of a bone-density test were unsettling.

The doctors couldn’t be more different in the way they interact with patients. To begin with, the podiatrist takes no insurance, including Medicare, and his fees are, to my way of thinking at least, exorbitant. He also is known to order radiological procedures that aren’t covered. I have an idea that he pays almost no attention to whatever written records are kept, as he reacts with a fresh eye to what he observes on any given visit. When he arrives in the examining room, he asks me how everything is in the Hamptons, takes a look at the foot with the problem, and is gone in a flash. As I check out, his staff asks if I want to schedule another visit, but he hasn’t said a word to me about whether or not I need one. 

You might ask why I persist in going to him? 

It turns out that he has just about cured a longstanding infection by prescribing an ointment that apparently is otherwise indicated for the scalp (as crazy as that sounds . . . and my apologies for the over-sharing!). He is associated with one of the city’s best hospitals, and despite his offhand style, his reputation as someone who achieves results seems warranted.

The endocrinologist, on the other hand, will sit down and talk, a more old-fashioned approach. I have never been tall, and lately have been forced to admit to being a few inches shorter than I used to be; the goal now is to keep my bones as strong as possible, which will also help keep me from, well, shrinking. She has recommended a drug to be infused every six months and discussed its possible side effects. And she said the best thing I could do to help myself was to walk! That’s a prescription I can live with. Furthermore, her secretary is so helpful she truly warrants the title of administrative assistant. 

Sensitive that my share of the cost of the infused drug is high, the endocrinologist made inquiries last week about why the prescription had not arrived when I was scheduled for treatment this week, on Monday. By Friday, however, no one was available to let me know if the infusion procedure could still take place. That left me in a spot. Was I going to get on an early Jitney for the city only to find the appointment had to be canceled? Or was I to stay home only to find I had missed the infusion?

And then, on Sunday night, my cellphone rang. It was 10 p.m. The assistant was calling to apologize about my inability to reach her on Friday — and to tell me to stay home. The procedure would be rescheduled. A phone call late on Sunday night? Talk about old-fashioned care.

The moral of this story is that there are physicians of the finest calibre available, with or without insurance. I am lucky to be able to afford one of a new school, all efficiency and no chit-chat; and to have found another of the old school, who has perfected what they used to call beside manner. If anyone would like their numbers, give me a ring.

The president has asked that we act more in harmony with each other, that we step up to the plate insofar as citizenship goes, that we not give in to antipathy and fear, and that we retain our native optimism.

(All this on the eve of the Steelers-Broncos playoff game! But I was listening. My petulance shall be measured, I promise, Gavin, should we lose.)

Delivered with humor and resoluteness (hardly the tone you’d expect from a diffident leader), the president’s cadenced address was essentially, as The Times said the next day, an appeal to our better natures. And why not, given the incessant demagogic frothing that has clouded the Republican candidates’ “debates” thus far.

What’s really scary is that if we — the majority of us — lend our ears, and our votes, to a rabble-rouser on Election Day, we will get the tyrant we deserve.

Plato said that in the normal course of things tyranny would succeed democracy, though this one has yet to tilt very much in the plebeian direction. Quite to the contrary, wealth and power continue to be ever more concentrated in fewer hands. 

Poverty, a Times columnist said the day after the State of the Union address, stands at 14.8 percent now, higher than when President Obama took office. Coincidentally, Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we’re about to celebrate as I write, said — and this was in 1967, mind, almost 50 years ago — that “the curse of poverty has no justification in our age.”

We are mighty, yes, as Obama said, but we would be mightier still, and more of a shining example to the world, if the promise of our democracy, and the active and informed citizenry it requires, were furthered through an excellent education accessible to all. So that everyone has a chance to shape one’s life — and, by extension, one’s society — for the better. 

Surely bombs won’t do it. 

On the one hand, I enjoyed it when Stuart Vorpahl phoned the office. On the other, there was usually a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when the front office said he was on the line because he almost never called when he agreed with something we had written.

“You got that wrong, bub,” he’d say, then explain a particular historical detail or geographical nuance we had reported in error, at least to his way of thinking. But though Stuart could be cranky, years of reading local history and a lifetime on the water here made his word as good as it gets.

As I recall, I had first gotten to know Stuart back around the time he was recuperating from an early heart problem and needed help setting out trap stakes. One spring day he picked me up early, and we headed out to Lazy Point in his truck.

Unlike most of the other trap fishermen around here, Stuart favored steel trap stakes over wood. He would set them from a barge, which he had welded himself. Stuart moved the barge around with a smaller powerboat; I can’t at this point remember much about it other than that he had rigged up a self-made autopilot after a fashion: a sash weight with a hook that allowed it to hang on the boat’s wheel.

I only lasted as a deckhand about a day; I twisted an ankle when I slipped on a stake and couldn’t stand the following morning. For years afterward, a sense that I had missed out on something important bothered me.

If that day with Stuart marked an unfortunate start and end to my commercial fishing career, he never busted my chops about it. There were always bigger matters to talk about when we spoke.

Stuart knew as much as anyone about colonial agreements between the East Hampton Town Trustees and the royal authorities. These, in his eyes, allowed town residents to fish without state licenses, and he was disappointed when he never had a chance to prove the point in court. 

It was on the occasion that we had printed something in The Star that might have cast a shadow on these early rights that I last heard from him. The phone buzzed, and a voice from downstairs said, “David, Stuart Vorpahl’s on line one.” And I knew I was in for it.

At Stuart’s funeral on Tuesday at the Amagansett Presbyterian Church, Hugh King compared him to Fishhooks Mulford, an early-18th-century colonist who sailed to London to challenge a tax on whaling, saying Fishhooks was Stuart’s most important political forebear. Hugh said that it had taken 300 years for East Hampton to produce a second visionary of Fishhooks Mulford’s stature and that he hoped it would not take 300 more for there to be another. It was likely, he said, that Stuart’s truck, an ancient Willys that had, like its owner, defied the odds for a long time, would still be running.

Long ago, when I was about to marry into The East Hampton Star family, I took a course at Columbia University's School of Continuing Education  on how to write obituaries. It was prophetic.

The professor was Richard Baker, a dean of the School of Journalism, where I had a job. The exercise was simple: He handed out fictional information about someone who had died, and the task was to put a story together in a logical and readable manner. (As it turned out, he played the piano when I married for the first time and became a Rattray. It was a journalism-school wedding.)

As an undergraduate, I had excelled in a nonfiction writing course, so I was reasonably comfortable about what lay ahead when I arrived in East Hampton. The hardest thing for me at the time, as it most often is for young reporters who have joined The Star over the years, was making phone calls to the bereaved. It takes a while before you realize you are apt to find a family member who, even while grieving, will want to tell you the missing details after you explain that the purpose of the obituary will be to do justice to someone's life.

The Star has guided many young reporters in writing obituaries, following fixed practices while trying to capture individuals' personalities and accomplishments. We have gained a surprising national reputation for their quality. Suddenly, this week, it fell on us to write the obituary of one of our own. Everyone here loved Rusty Drumm, who died on Saturday.

Writing obituaries can be a calling. The late Alden Whitman, who lived in Southampton, was one of the best at The New York Times; a book of 37 of his “favorites” was published in 1971. The Times has reporters assigned to obituaries and to the practice of writing some in advance. 

Over the weekend, The Star's managing editor, Carissa Katz, and editor, David Rattray, pulled together as much information as they immediately could for an obituary for our website, and then struggled somewhat about who would complete it for print today. I was relieved that it turned out to be Carissa.

And we are all grateful, too, that Christopher Walsh, a reporter, was able to write the obituary for Stuart Vorpahl, who died last Thursday; Chris covers the environmental issues to which Stuart devoted his life. David's column today is a memorial, as well.

I have written many obituaries about friends and at least one immediate relative, and I can testify that it is exceedingly difficult to write about someone to whom you were close. I am sure those I have written about strangers were better, including some that were about rather famous people, whose obituaries were also run in the metropolitan press.

I am not sure whether Everett T. Rattray, who edited The Star from 1958 until his death in January 1980, just wanted to make sure his obituary came out right, or whether he wanted to do us all a favor, but he wrote his own.

Near the end of an interview about the Killer Bees, during which I rhapsodized at great length about the school that’s out-Hoosiered the Hoosiers for more than a generation in the old sense of the word, for 30-plus years in short, I was asked if I’d ever seen any of the players cop an attitude on the court, and I said, on reflection, that I never ever had.

Why did I think that was, I was asked. 

“Because they’re confident,” I said, still marveling at the insight and holding up my old compound-fractured tennis racket frame, a relic of tantrums not all that long past, as an example of what one does if one, despite having lived more than the allotted three score and ten, hasn’t yet gained the confidence and maturity that treats victory and defeat as the imposters they are.

When I mentioned Roger Golden, the progenitor of the Killer Bees’ long history of success, to Scott Rubenstein the other day, after the interview, and asked him what it was about him that had got the first group of Bridgehampton’s boys basketball state champions to play so well, he said, “He was calm — they were so used to being yelled at, yelled at by everybody. He respected them, he cared about them, and they respected him in turn.”

Undoubtedly there have been, are, and will be egos in Bridgehampton, but I’ve never seen evidence of personal pique or rub-your-nose-in-it swagger — as I have elsewhere — when a Killer Bee team plays.

I remember saying Emily Dickinson said you knew it was poetry if it took the top of your head off. “Watching your first game in the Beehive is like that,” I said. “It takes the top of your head off.”

If I didn’t say it in front of the camera, I’d like to say now that the Killer Bees play with confidence, they play with grace, and I’d like to say they’ve always played as one — a lesson for us all. 

At their best, which is to say more than a few times over the 36 years I’ve been covering them, the Killer Bees have approached perfection, something so few of us do. 

And in so doing, they have been blessed.

The wind woke me up early Wednesday, which was a good thing. I had gone to sleep the night before setting the alarm on my phone in order to get up and get some work done before the house stirred, but things being what they are, it had run out of battery life sometime during the night. 

It is astonishing, really, that we (I) have become so dependent on devices sold by Apple or Samsung or whatever, and so assured of their constant presence, that we (I) have, for example, put away our traditional alarm clocks. Their ubiquity and utility means we no longer have to plan who’s picking up the kids — “I’ll just text you!” — or even take a good old-fashioned book to bed at night. Yet when I really needed to get moving in order to attend to a few things, like write this column, the most analog of wake-up calls, a shifting, hard gust of wind, came to the rescue. 

The northwest wind is cold down here near the beach at Gardiner’s Bay, and the tiled kitchen, which faces the bay in this aging house, is chilly at 5:45 a.m. Still, because I needed to get things done, the temperature had its advantages. 

Normally the dawn routine is dictated to me by Leo, the house-pig. After eating, he insists on attention, begging for ear-scratching by rooting at my ankles or, if that fails, rotating the claw-foot table at which I am trying to work. Pigs are strong, even relatively small ones. Leo is not much bigger than an average Labrador retriever, albeit with stubbier legs, yet with a flick of his snout, the oak table scoots across the floor. Not on Wednesday, however. The drafty air quickly convinced him to climb back into his covered bed and settle down, invisible except for a lump at one side. 

That he has a bed at all is a bit of a relief; he and the dogs had destroyed it around Thanksgiving, and none of the quick alternatives seemed to do. A replacement was back-ordered where Lisa had bought the original, and the combination of old pillows and threadbare beach towels were a poor substitute. 

Of course, just about as soon as Leo settled down on Wednesday, the dogs started squabbling over a toy. Then our soon-to-be-6-year-old son woke up. And then the day really began.

How lucky we were that the surf drew Rusty Drumm to Montauk and then to us. His loss leaves The Star diminished, and it is also deeply personal. Even after he decided to give semiretirement a try, he was out there, part of the human landscape we could count on for knowledge, sharp opinion, and advice. He had rare acuity, the capacity to see what struck his eye in profound detail, which made him a superb reporter and writer. Perhaps most of all, he was a passionate and compassionate man who shared the joy he had in life. H.S.R.

“Not bad, if you like beauty,” he’d say on a crisp sunny day or in a spot that was so much more than “not bad.” It might be Tobago, or St. Bart’s, Waikiki, or a place like Montauk, which he called “God’s country.” 

“Heading off to God’s country,” he’d say as he left the office for home or surf or a breeze that promised good sailing, and soon you’d come to see it his way. He was persuasive. He could wrap you up in a good story, in a perspective, and you’d believe it like doctrine. And if you remembered what was important — that happiness thing — it was a passport to the world through his eyes, a cooler, better world, where everyone got a nickname and they all knew him by name. C.K.

Drumm, as I called him almost exclusively, had many gifts. He was a surfer, father, writer, historian, fisherman, sailor, cook, and for more than a generation The Star’s — and Montauk’s — philosopher king. But his greatest gifts were the lessons he taught us all about how to live a life, to understand the past but not to be bitter about how much things might have changed, to embrace each and every day to its fullest. Toes on the nose, brother, toes on the nose. D.E.R.

Rusty was anything but. Always at the top of his game, he was a beacon for me inasmuch as he knew well how to balance work and play, how to make them one, in fact.

“He lived a good life; Rusty knew how to have fun,” Mary said amid her tears on learning the shocking news the other day that he had died. I remember him saying to me, “Moderation in all things . . . including moderation.”

It was last summer, I think, that he told me in the Star parking lot that he had prostate cancer. “Well, you’ll live at least another 15 years,” I said, hopefully, thinking of people I knew who had it, athletic, optimistic people like him.

He was always fun to talk to — about history, the natural world, lacrosse, skiing, surfing, squash, interesting characters, anything really — a constant for me, always wise, always good-humored, a North Star. J.G.

He was my touchstone at The Star — you know, a person with whom you’re completely at ease; you don’t have to say much and they get what you mean and what you’re feeling, because they know you, really know you. And you know them, too. 

It’s a scarce blessing to have such a relationship, such an effortless and gratifying connection with another human being. And that human being being Rusty, it was always interesting and fun. His ritual of pulling my hair when he’d come up behind me to sharpen his pencils at the old wall-mounted sharpener near my desk was straight from the pigtails-in-inkwell playbook.

And how could I possibly choose among 20 years’ worth of catchphrases and running jokes that we shared? However, as a fellow government reporter, I will mention one enduring one that we have all enjoyed, the stunning lead Rusty once wrote for a story on some bureaucratic report: “A thick document that took years to prepare was unveiled on Friday amid a flurry of press releases.” J.P.

In mid-February of last year’s never-ending winter, he wrote: “During Sunday’s brief thaw I took a walk with a few friends down the beach at Ditch Plain to the Shadmoor bluffs. As we walked, the sun turned the ice crystals in the bluff face to water that spilled like tears down to the beach in rivulets of mud, chunks of earth, and rocks.”

Pure Rusty, yes? I wonder if he went home that day and sat right down to write about a Montauk bluff and a monster rock near its edge, with 17th-century pirate gold buried beneath it. The bluff erodes over time and the rock plunges down to the beach below, cold-cocking two furtive lovers who are lying there entwined and killing them.

That’s one thread from Rusty’s last, unpublished book, whimsically titled “Confessions of a Pool Boy,” which it isn’t, though he was, briefly. I was honored to have been asked to copy-edit it.

“I’m so glad to have finished the book,” he emailed last month. “I think it’s good, but I fear I’m not going to have the strength to really finish it.” 

Jimmy Buffett had offered him and Kyle the use of his house in Hawaii after New Year’s, he said, or the one on St. Bart’s, take your choice. He was so looking forward. I.S.

I never enjoyed The Star more than my first year or year and a half when I worked next to Rusty tucked away in a back office. Happy memories. B.G.

I paid cash at the Montauk office, how could I have a bill? Back when I first started working at The Star, in 1988, Rusty and a few others were working at The Star’s office in Montauk. Whenever a client placed an ad and paid cash in that office, it apparently went toward lunch. “I paid cash in Montauk. . . .” It has been a running joke ever since.

His theory was that it was petty cash, and if he was hungry, well then. . . . Looking back, I’m sorry I never made it out to the Montauk office; they were sure having fun out there. 

Don’t sweat the small stuff. That’s the thing that I can take from being privileged to have known him. Rusty was always able to live life to the fullest. I will miss his generous spirit, his sense of adventure, his humor, and his lighthearted way. R.K. 

I first met Rusty in 1983, when he was recruited to sell ad space in Montauk in addition to joining the editorial staff to cover the Montauk waterfront. With his easy, friendly manner and great sense of humor he was a natural, but I always knew his first love and main interest was writing. 

Rusty did, indeed, increase The Star’s Montauk advertising lineage in the months he worked with us in the ad department, but after his first summer, we got calls from Montauk accounts saying that they had received incorrect bills for their ads. They quoted Rusty as saying that he would take care of it, which, always busy writing, he never got around to.

His main interest was writing, and what a writer he was! M.H.

In August 1985 I saw a help-wanted ad in The Star looking for an advertising salesperson for the Montauk area. I was an English lit major, waitressing at Gosman’s with a husband and a 4-year-old son and needed a full-time job. I called Drumm and asked him about it; he said it was his job, he was switching to writing, and that it would be perfect for me. I started in October, and we worked together in the Montauk office. 

Drumm would do almost anything for a story, a true reporter. Then, on July 17, 1996, the explosion and crash of TWA Flight 800 occurred off Center Moriches, and Drumm was on the Coast Guard boat late that evening to aid with the search and rescue efforts. They were gone two days, and he was exhausted, both mentally and physically, when they returned. He became my hero when he told me most of what he had seen and done, a very brave soul. J.B.

On July 3, 1996, Rusty and I left Hamburg and motored down the Elbe River aboard the U.S.C.G. Barque Eagle. We were in Hamburg to take on supplies and begin the Baltic Sea Races the following week. I would stay aboard for the race, but he had to go home. Our four days in Hamburg included lots of great German beer. We would get a fresh pickle every day from a young girl who sold them out of a barrel in the town square. Rusty sometimes went back for a second, and even a third.

So he flew home, and I sailed to St. Petersburg in the race, an event that remains a true highlight of my photographic career, and for that matter, my life. 

I felt bad that he had to go home because on July 18 he stood on the deck of another Coast Guard boat. This boat moved slowly through the wreckage of TWA Flight 800 retrieving body after body after body after the plane exploded in the sky off Moriches the night before. I remember him saying that he didn’t have to be there, but the men and women of the Coast Guard did. He was there to tell the story. It was something he could do really well no matter what he wrote about.

I’m going to Berlin and Hamburg in the coming weeks to continue my ongoing project documenting the refugee crisis, and I’m going back to that little square to see if the pickle girl, now a pickle woman, might still be there. Either way, I’m getting a pickle and a cold beer in your honor, Rusty. D.K.

Rusty and I shared a love of the Hawaiian Islands, Waikiki and Diamond Head in particular. His smile was always infectious, especially the last time I saw him come up the stairs, despite his struggles. A true light. 

“Groovy?” Aloha nui loa, Rusty. M.C.

On my first day working at The Star, he gave me a welcoming smile, and then asked me my nationality. I told him “Thai,” and he said he had traveled there and loved it. 

The last time I saw him, this past summer at work, he said, “You’re back with us again? How nice!” And he took out his cellphone to show me a photo of his beautiful granddaughter, a look of love, happiness, warmth, and light in his eyes as we looked at the photo. It’s the look that I will always remember him by. Y.V.

I shared an office with Rusty from July 2012 until his semiretirement, at which time he brought me to a meeting of the East Hampton Town Trustees, introduced me to the board, and took his leave, though not before an impromptu-yet-eloquent discourse on that body and its role in the town.

The following summer, I had the task of delivering copies of The Star to resorts in Montauk, including the Montauk Beach House. That was the best stop on the route because I knew there was a good chance I’d see him. He clearly relished his new career as the pool boy, and we would always chat for a few minutes. 

Rusty was a great storyteller, and while sharing this office he freely dispensed much of the knowledge gathered over decades of reporting, living in Montauk, and working on the water. I was happy to know that, in recent years, he vacationed on St. Bart’s, which I imagined the perfect destination for a man I perceived as equal parts Thor Heyerdahl, Ernest Hemingway, and Captain Kidd. C.W.

There is a term for him in Spanish: duende, which loosely means having soul or the power to attract through personal magnetism and charm. We might call it mojo. When Rusty smiled at you, you felt special. You wanted to be part of his galaxy. When he walked into a room, everyone noticed. When he left a room, you wished he had singled you out for a wave goodbye. The man had charisma. D.G.

Aside from the gift of just knowing him, I will be eternally grateful to Rusty for the eloquent and very personal obituary he wrote for my husband, Phil Presby. He spun the general biographic facts into an ennobling account of a life, precious in its sparkling concision. He gave us mourners a comfort we hadn’t imagined possible. I hope his family will have something as consoling to get them through their dark days.

“Yuck!” he said in one of the last emails to me, a fellow traveler through this grim journey. “I wish more people could share, just briefly, the rare perspective this disease visits on both the sick and the people taking care of them. The world would be a far better place. We have so much to be thankful for — why are we so blind?” I’m sharing some of those words here, Rusty. Let’s hope people listen. J.L.

Russell Drumm annoyed me constantly. Not because of his personality. In 26 years of working with him I only yelled at him once; he totally deserved it. He was one of the most positive, intelligent, humorous, insightful people I’ve known. He was a pleasure to work with, surf with, and just generally be around. 

What annoyed me about Russell Drumm is that my name is Russell and people would constantly call The Star for one reason or another, and if they asked me my name and I replied, “Russell,” I would have to listen to them go on and on about how great I was, how much they loved my writing, and how much of an asset I was to the paper and the community. Then I would have to say, “No, I’m Russell Bennett,” and endure the look or sound of disappointment. They all basically said, “Oh, I’m sure being Russell Bennett is nice, too.” 

I’m going to miss being mistaken for him. R.B.

Sitting at his desk, typing away at an old computer, Drifter Dog, as he referred to his black Lab, sleeping by his side — that’s how I will remember Rusty. Always smiling, and why not? There was another wave ahead, another sail to look forward to. He was one of those people a cub reporter was thankful to have known, as he was never stingy with his time or his contacts. T.K.V.

Russell Drumm was a senior writer and columnist for The Star. He died on Saturday. An obituary appears elsewhere in today’s paper. This tribute was penned by 18 of his Star colleagues, or as we like to think of it, his Star family.

“Teach me a kick serve,” I said to Lisa Jones, “and it will be the last piece in the jeweled crown that is my doubles tennis game.”

I tried it in our group last night, with middling results, and by the end of the musical chairs — we play best-of-seven games with six or so partners throughout the course of the two hours — I was, as has been the case the last two times I’ve played, pretty much exhausted. 

Yet, by morning, I was on the road to being reconstituted, less inclined to wax maudlin on the ebbing of energy, and ready to fail again. 

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Tad Friend, who wrote of his revived squash game in The New Yorker last week, says they are his favorite words from Beckett. More hopeful, I think, than his “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

But just you wait. The Steelers will be back. I had hoped to conjure a win in Denver the other day by catching a toilet roll Mary had tossed me from the front hall closet and doing a back flip onto the seat, where I proceeded to do the crossword in its entirety — usually a sure sign of victory — but no. No matter. Try again.

A little adjusting, perhaps a slight inward turn of the grip and some more spin on the brush-through, and some more practice ought to yield the desired result, which, of course, is to utterly dominate and crow incessantly.

Jack Gilbert, the late poet (from Pittsburgh, as a matter of fact), said we become too intelligent as we age — that we become moderate. So, I must improve, I can’t improve, I’ll improve.

Rusty Drumm used to say to me, “Moderation in all things . . . including moderation.” As in don’t be too moderate. When I complained to him once about being denied by management what I thought was money coming to me for unused vacation time, he said it had never occurred to him not to use his vacation time.

He didn’t fret, as I did — though somewhat less now, thanks to him — about indispensability or whether we were having fun yet. He had fun and he was indispensable.

He had a good thing going. 

Kind words offered from a genuine place are the best type of words. They are a walking stick on uneven terrain. They are a ladder up from somewhere dark and undesirable. 

I was in a place like that three times within the span of a year, with the death of my father in December, the passing of my maternal grandmother in June, and the death of a dear cousin the December before that. But word by word, whether written or spoken, the sincere condolences shared by the people around me were what brought me back to a place where I could be okay.

Literally the physical representation of carrying those words around with me, the sympathy cards I have received from family members, friends, and colleagues have spent the last month tucked inside my handbag. That way, I know there are kind words intended for my comfort pretty much any time I need them.

Which, sadly, has been often. You never know when a “whoa” moment is going to hit you. Just last Thursday, for instance, I was in Starbucks and grabbed a bunch of napkins to take into the car along with my coffee. I added them to the pile of napkins I forgot I already had in my car, then realized I was a champion fast-food napkin-hoarder like my dad had been. Is that hereditary or is it a learned behavior? I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. I closed my eyes, thought back on some of the sentiments that friends and colleagues have shared, and was able to keep it together.

In the aftermath of my father’s death just a few days before Christmas, some of the most meaningful words of support I heard came from a community figure well known and well respected on the East End. Along with her condolences came some advice, too: Look into the work of Brené Brown, a social worker and researcher who focuses on vulnerability, shame, and empowerment. I’ve watched several of Ms. Brown’s YouTube videos and purchased one of her books, and so far what I’ve learned is that allowing oneself to be vulnerable — in moments of grief, for instance, or in joy or uncertainty — lays the groundwork for incredible personal growth. It is the birthplace of courage and change. And that place between your vulnerability and others’ reactions to your particular life event or situation is where true friends are made and lost. That is the space where kind words really matter.

They can do no harm. Why do they not flow more freely? Go on; give them. Mean them. There will be no regrets.

Also know that some of the nicest sentiments are actually questions. To go beyond “I’m sorry for your loss” with something like “Tell me about your father” indicates an extra level of care. The implication is that you’re being not just compassionate but also that you are sharing a few moments of your time for your grieving friend to listen to what she has to say. Thus, the effect of a sympathetic question is therapeutic.

My sister and I also got a lot of kind words in the form of spiritual thoughts and prayers sent our way, and although we are not strictly religious people, to be held in someone’s prayers was a comfort and an honor as well.

I was pretty young when my mother taught me the proper way to write a thank-you note. It was appropriate to gratefully and formally acknowledge one’s actions or gifts. Nowadays I’ll usually start with something like, “Thank you for your thoughtful gift,” or in this case, “Thank you for your kind words,” and go on to share a note about how that person’s gift or letter impacted me. But somehow, a notecard didn’t seem a big enough way to express how grateful I am for everyone’s well-wishes and concern.

This is my thank-you for all those kind words and prayers.

Thank you.

Christine Sampson is a reporter at The Star.

Forgive me if I have mentioned this before, but the sad fact that Leo ate his bed has our house a-fluster. Forget about the last-minute gift shopping and wrapping and decorating the tree, the fact that our not-so-small pet house-pig now has nowhere appropriate to sleep is a very big deal.

One of the things I have learned about pigs is that they are big babies. Well, at least Leo is. He likes to keep warm and complains bitterly when he is not. About a year ago, Lisa found the perfect solution, a huge dog bed with a cover that was open on one side.

Leo loved to creep inside it, rotating like a mole under a lawn until just his nose peeked out for air. Sometimes, Luna, the little pug, would sneak in to torment him, but most of the time he would just sleep away the days in peace. Until just before Thanksgiving.

Pigs are expressive creatures, creative even. Leo’s art (other than whining about whatever bothers him) involves knocking things over. We had four sturdy, antique wooden kitchen chairs; one by one, they fell to pieces under his assaults. Place anything new on the floor, and he is going to push it around with his snout. It’s the rooting instinct, I guess. Some pig fanciers’ websites suggest providing them with open boxes of rocks to satisfy their urge to snuffle about; we’ll have to try that.

So it was hardly surprising that at a certain point, Leo’s attention would turn to his own bed. A tiny tear in the fabric became bigger and bigger, and soon he was digging into the stuffing within and spreading it across the kitchen floor. It was off to the landfill with it soon enough.

When the weather is warm enough for Leo to sleep on our unheated porch, he forces his way under the cushions on the former analyst’s sofa we keep out there. But even in this mild December, there is a little too much chill for his tropical blood. Instead, he has tried to nest in a succession of pads, beach towels, and old blankets.

It would all be easy had the bed he liked not gone out of stock at the source where Lisa bought it. Leo’s reactions to the traditional dog beds we had procured locally were mixed, but he’ll have to make do for now.

In other pig news, I owe a shout-out to a reader and regular letter-writer who stopped by the office with a gift of three winged-pig ornaments she had found in a shop. Thank you, Diana Walker. We’ll make sure to keep them out of Leo’s reach.