Cities have grown bigger, hours have grown shorter. Walls have grown too high to chat over and streets are too dangerous to play or stroll on.  It is the modern tale of neighborhood fracturing occurring all over the world. The internet has leapt in to satiate our instinctive tribalism but somehow we miss something or someone as close as across the fence. Community is about connectivity and despite the lauded virtues of social media, the plethora of personalised chatrooms and electronic networks, there is an ineffable reality in real human contact. Community is about connectivity but it is about a lot more than words and pictures. Despite our sophistication, every solitary death of that kind reminds us fearfully just how lonely and alone we can be, how easily the inexorable whirl of life can forget us when we are past our prime.  

So it is enormously heartening to relate the story of Sarah Martin. Hers is not an unusual story.  The misery and fear of serious illness are something many people will face. It is all the more tragic that Sarah is both young and has a young family.  But in other ways it is an often told story from an ordinary suburban court in an ordinary neighbourhood. Yet out of this has come something simple but extraordinary; the unstinting support of friends and neighbours since her diagnosis.

Sometimes it is only little things like mowing her lawn or helping with some cooked food. But it is the spirit that drives her neighbours, that galvanizing urge to do a little to help others, to make sure we have their sympathy and support, that is the essence of community.  Confronted with illness or hardship this story is a celebration of how much people matter. If this story is common then the fault is we do not tell it or applaud it enough.