Woman, grief-stricken by father's suicide, thanks comforting bystanders in open letter

Deborah Greene was completely shocked when she received a phone call in April 2015 with news that her father, Lowell Herman, had committed suicide.

"Dear Strangers," she wrote. "I remember you. 10 months ago, when my cell phone rang with news of my father's suicide, you were walking into Whole Foods, prepared to go about your food shopping, just as I had done only minutes before. You could have kept on walking, ignoring my cries, but you didn't. You could have simply stopped and stared at my primal display of pain, but you didn't."

She goes on to say that store patrons comforted her, asked for her phone password so that they could call and inform her husband and offered to drive her home. They prayed with her and contributed money to buy her a giftcard to the store, which she would later use during her time of mourning.

"I remember one of you asking if you could pray for me and for my father," Greene wrote. "I must have said yes, and now when I recall that Christian prayer being offered up to Jesus for my Jewish father and me, it still both brings tears to my eyes and makes me smile. As I sat (with a friend,) one of you sent back a gift card to Whole Foods; though you didn't know me, you wanted to offer a little something to let me know that you would be thinking of me and holding me and my family in your thoughts and prayers. That gift card helped to feed my family, when the idea of cooking was so far beyond my emotional reach."