When Eleanor Heginbotham’s car broke down on New Year’s Eve, a group of strangers jumped in

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.

It was New Year’s Eve 2022 and for the first time in decades Eleanor Heginbotham was spending the holiday by herself. Her husband of 62 years, Erland, had died in June.

“I was feeling blue,” Heginbotham, 86, said. “I was trying not to feel blue, but … I was alone.”

To cheer herself up, she decided to work on her holiday cards. That afternoon, she drove from her home in Bethesda, Md., to her church in Washington, D.C. From there, she stopped at a nearby post office to drop off the cards. When she returned to her car, though, it wouldn’t start. Her heart sank.

 ”There was not a peep out of my car,” she said. “It was totally, totally, totally dead.”

Heginbotham thought of calling roadside assistance, but it was getting dark and cold, and she realized it would likely take a long time for help to arrive on a holiday. So she went back inside the post office, with a plan she felt was a long shot.

 ”I just … said to the whole little room, ‘Does anyone know how to jump start a car?'” Heginbotham recalled. “One woman, right away, without a nanosecond hesitation said, ‘I do.’ “

The woman, Soumayah Zein, came outside with a friend and got to work. When they couldn’t make any progress, Heginbotham told Zein not to worry.

 ”I kept saying, ‘It’s OK … You should get on with your life,'” Heginbotham recalled. “She said, ‘No, no, no. We’ll try to help.’ “

Over the next 40 minutes, three people in the parking lot lent a hand as the post office closed. As they all did their best to start the car, the small crowd got acquainted. One of them was a museum director; another was a lawyer. There were five people of different ages, taking time to help a stranger on a cold holiday evening.

Finally, someone managed to get the car to start. Then Zein offered to follow Heginbotham home for the entire 30-minute drive to ensure she wasn’t stranded if her car’s battery died again.

“Everybody was very worried about this old lady getting home, because now it was dark,” Heginbotham said.

When they got to her apartment complex, Heginbotham invited Zein to come inside.

“We had cookies and tea and we started talking and we found that we had a lot in common,” Heginbotham said. “Two strangers who really had known nothing about each other became pretty close.”

Heginbotham shared that she worried about aging without her husband and wondered what she would do next. Zein talked about her faith and her conversion to Christianity. They discovered they both went to the same high school, many years apart.

Heginbotham, a former professor of English and scholar of Emily Dickinson, was delighted to learn that they also shared a love of literature. They remain friends today.

In reflecting back on the crowd of strangers who came to her rescue that day, Heginbotham thinks of a few lines from the Dickinson poem, “A Deed knocks first at Thought.”

“A deed knocks first at thought, and then it knocks at will … It then goes out an act,” Heginbotham said.

“That’s what goodness is about, really, is action. But first of all … it has to come from the mind and the heart. And these people who are kind did that.”

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.