Can No One Help Me?

In 2020, in Alton, a small town in Hampshire, England, a man put a poster in his window.

It read: "I have lost Jo. My wife and soul mate."

And further down: "Can no one help me?"

His name was Tony Williams. He was 75. A retired physicist. He had no children.

With Jo, he had lived 25 years in Kempley, near Gloucester. Then the couple moved to Alton, so Jo could be near her sister.

Soon after, Jo learned she had pancreatic cancer. She died nine days later, in May 2020.

Tony found himself alone, in a town where he knew no one. It was lockdown. He went through it, he said, utterly alone.

He tried everything. Two newspaper ads. Business cards with his name and number, which he handed out at the supermarket and on his walks. No one called.

The poster in the window was his last resort. Not many people passed his house. He only hoped that someone in the neighbourhood would reach out.

Then a newspaper told his story. It went onto social media. Within 24 hours, it had gone around the world.

The phone rang. And again. And again. At the peak, messages arrived at four or five a minute. His email account crashed.

People called from Cairo, Florida, Germany, the Netherlands. They wrote from Australia, India, Japan. They invited him for drinks, for lunch, on road trips. Families offered to have their children adopt him as a grandfather. A local teacher offered to have her class write him letters.

Tony Williams could hardly believe it:

The same screens that sometimes isolate us carried his call to the far side of the world. But what rescued him from the silence were people, one by one, who picked up the phone.

Somewhere, maybe on your street, someone has not yet dared to put up a poster.