Dear Eric: While shopping at Costco, I saw a woman in her 40s who appeared to be struggling with a large, heavy box on a high shelf. As she attempted to remove it, the box slipped and fell in front of me.
I hesitated to help, partly out of concern for my own safety in lifting something potentially heavy, and partly because I wasn’t sure how to react. I also thought she could have asked an employee for help, which is what I would have done.
By the way, I’m a petite Asian woman in my late 50s, and the lady who dropped the box was a white woman.
As I walked away, she confronted me, saying she would have offered to help if the roles were reversed. This made me feel guilty, so I offered to assist her, but she declined and walked away upset.
I’m left wondering if I was wrong not to help her immediately and if it’s fair for her to have confronted me like that. Additionally, I’m curious if the racial dynamics might have played a role in my reaction or her response.
– Hesitant Helper
Dear Helper: One thing is for sure: the lawyers who handle liability for the Costco corporation would have greatly preferred that the woman ask an employee for help with the heavy box instead of trying to wrangle it down herself.
Other things are less clear. We’ll never know if your race was a motivator for her, consciously or unconsciously. But, as a person of color, being yelled at in public like that possibly brought up hard emotions for you from other experiences that were more overtly racialized. It’s healthy to process that.
I’m unsure when she wanted your help – while getting the box down or when trying to pick it back up. Either way, her decision-making has nothing to do with you. What if you had a bad back? What if you’d just gotten a manicure?
One is never going to go wrong asking another person “Do you want help?” But you can also communicate clearly about what help is possible if it’s asked for. “I don’t feel safe supporting that box, but if you push it back and wait, I can grab an employee.”
Dear Eric: My sister was engaged to a guy, “Peter.” I’ve known Peter for a long time.
Not long before the wedding was to take place, she broke the engagement because she met someone else, “Rick.” She married Rick and they moved away.
Peter and I have never really spoken about my sister or what happened, but I know he was deeply hurt. I’ve not heard of him dating anyone since then.
Peter knows she married Rick, but she’s not on social media so he may not know that they have had two children in the past three years and just found out she’s pregnant with twins.
Now she and Rick are moving back to the area. It’s a small enough place that it’s only a matter of time before they cross paths with Peter.
I’d like to say something to Peter. My husband says to keep well out of it, they’re all adults and will have to work it out for themselves. I know I’d like to be prepared if I were in Peter’s shoes. What do you think?
– Bad News Bearer
Dear Bearer: Stay out of it and let Peter take his chances with kismet, coincidence, and all the other cosmic forces that bring exes together at the best/worst possible moments in rom-coms and nighttime soap opera cliffhangers.
While you’ve known Peter for a while, you write that you haven’t heard about him dating other people. If you were close, he’d tell you himself.
So, he may not be at a point, emotionally, where your sister’s happy home life will devastate him anymore. Or, if he is still tender, hearing the news from you might feel just as bad as stumbling upon it himself.
Leave him be and let the plot mechanics of small-town life do what they will.
Dear Eric: Your advice to Willed to Give (August 3) may have omitted a key point. The stepson supposedly “whined” his mother into changing her will on her “deathbed.” This has the earmarks of undue influence and other potential legal issues.
The daughters would be well advised to see an estate litigation attorney to review these suspicious facts.
– Reader
Dear Reader: I should have been more precise with my language. I wrote that the will was unchangeable. That’s not true. The daughters can contest, even if their father (the letter writer) can’t.
Willed to Give can give the above advice to his daughters, but I’d caution him against getting any more involved in the situation, as his unwilling involvement was the problem he wrote in about in the first place.
Send questions to R. Eric Thomas at eric@askingeric.com or P.O. Box 22474, Philadelphia, PA 19110. Follow him on Instagram @oureric and sign up for his weekly newsletter at rericthomas.com.