Leaves piled up after her husband’s injury. Then a friend showed up with a rake

This story is part of the My Unsung Hero series, from the Hidden Brain team. It features stories of people whose kindness left a lasting impression on someone else.

When Eileen Freiberg-Dale thinks of her husband of 37 years, Barney, she remembers a man with boundless energy and interests.

“He was an incredibly smart, very passionate man,” she recalled. “He loved to hike, he loved to backpack, he loved to bike.”

Together, they raised two kids and ran a business in Newton, Mass.

But in August of 2017, Barney had a serious accident while riding his bike, which caused a traumatic brain injury. Freiberg-Dale says that when Barney finally came home in mid-October, after spending months in rehab facilities and an intensive care unit, he wasn’t the same.

“His mood was agitated and angry, and he could barely walk,” Freiberg-Dale recalled. “He couldn’t screen his responses to things, so they just came pouring out.”

Freiberg-Dale says that those first few months were among the hardest of her life. She was grieving the life partner she no longer had and worried about how she would run their business on her own. She was also overwhelmed by the number of things she now had to do for Barney — providing all of his daily physical care, taking him to doctor’s appointments, managing the medical bills.

Then, there were chores around their home, like the leaves that were piling up in their yard. They had to be cleared by the end of October, when the city stopped collecting them.

“Barney had always been the one to take care of that and he could no longer do that,” she said.

One day, Freiberg-Dale realized that she was running out of time to deal with the yard. So, she went outside and started raking the leaves.

“As I did that, madly trying to get them into bins and in bags, I was crying. I was stressed. I didn’t know how I was going to do it all,” she remembered.

“All of a sudden there was a tap on my shoulder, and I turned around and there was Jonathan Lilienfeld,” Freiberg-Dale said.

Lilienfeld had been the couple’s friend of nearly 15 years. Though they hadn’t discussed the leaves, he had figured she could use the help and arrived right at that moment with a rake and leaf bags.

“Jonathan just looked at me, put his arm around me and said, ‘Go inside, I’ll take care of this,'” she recalled. “He just said, ‘Go inside and rest.'”

Over the next few hours, Lilienfeld raked the entire yard. He packed up all the leaves in leaf bags and put them out in front of the house. When he was done, he came inside for a quick goodbye and then went on his way.

Today, eight years later, Freiberg-Dale still gets emotional when she recalls Lilienfeld’s gesture of kindness.

“It felt so momentous. I truly felt like he was my hero, that he rescued me,” she said. “I was just so touched. And anytime I think about it, I feel the same way.”

My Unsung Hero is also a podcast — new episodes are released every Tuesday. To share the story of your unsung hero with the Hidden Brain team, record a voice memo on your phone and send it to myunsunghero@hiddenbrain.org.