Sophia Steffel died this month. She was only 6 weeks old.
She spent her entire life in a hospital, tethered to hoses and tubes. She had what’s called a hepatic hemangioma in her liver—a tumor—and her parents were aware that her prognosis was not good. But Sophia’s father, Nathen Steffel, told ABC News it was the “best six weeks” he and his wife had ever had.
“Me and my wife were fortunate to spend so much time with her, as some parents do not even get the chance,” he said.
But because Sophia had been so sick for her short life, her parents were never able to get a picture of her without tubes and tape. So Nathen made a simple request on Reddit:
My daughter recently passed away after a long battle in the children’s hospital. Since she was in the hospital her whole life we never were able to get a photo without all her tubes. Can someone remove the tubes from this photo?
Someone did. Countless someones. Over the next couple of days, Nathen’s inbox was filled with pictures of his Sophia—not just Photoshopped images, but sketches and paintings, too. All the tubes and needles were gone: What was left was a beautiful little girl, lost too soon.
Nathen says he was overwhelmed by the response. “All I wanted was a nice picture,” Nathen wrote on Reddit. “What I received … [was] love and support from a bunch of strangers.”
The Internet can be a cruel place. Every day we read stories about cyberbullying or Twitter wars. We could watch mocking YouTube videos all day every day for the rest of our lives, it seems.
But lest we forget, the Internet is people. Everything we watch or read is a product of us, and more and more, we share our lives with each other digitally. We post our vacation pictures and “poke” our friends. We tell jokes and brag about our kids and fume about work, knowing our friends—whether across the street or across the world, whether we’ve known them all our lives or only know them online—will understand.
And sometimes we cry online, too. We grieve.
In real life, it can be hard to know how to help when someone close to us is hurting. We don’t know what to do. We don’t know what to say. We fix meals and give hugs and offer platitudes that from the moment they leave our lips, feel forced and hollow. We’re a fix-it culture: We want to make things better. But sometimes we can’t. We want to help, but we don’t know how.
And so, when a grieving father asks for something so simple, people responded. They didn’t know him. They never will. And yet there’s this desire—a need, maybe—to help. To come alongside and do what little they can, what little we can.
When I was a newspaper reporter, I did a lot of stories about death and loss. And when I’d talk to grief counselors or hospice workers about how we can help those who are suffering, this is what they said:
Be there. You don’t need to say anything special. You don’t necessarily need to do anything. Be there.
Those who took their time and talents to recraft Sophia’s picture were there in the only way they could be, and the best way imaginable. And maybe, in our own meager digital ways, we’re there, too.
The Steffels will probably never know us. They’ll never meet us. And yet right now, between whatever appointments or deadlines we have, we’re all thinking about Sophia and her family. We’re grieving a little with them. We’re there, I think, in the only way we strangers can be. And even though they’ll never know, I’d like to think that somehow it still matters.
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