The World Knew Them as the Elderly Couple I Helped During COVID. I Knew Them as Alice and Peter.
The complete story of a chance encounter in Green Bay, an extraordinary outpouring of generosity, and a friendship that continued for four years.
On March 13, 2020, I walked into a CVS pharmacy in Green Bay, Wisconsin, expecting to pick up a prescription and a few things I needed. I walked out having met two people who would remain part of my life for the next four years.
Their names were Alice and Peter.
At the time, I knew almost nothing about them. Peter was an elderly man using a walker, struggling to find toilet paper for himself and his sick wife. Alice was waiting outside in their vehicle with oxygen equipment. I had no way of knowing that this brief encounter would become a story shared around the world—or that the story most people heard would be only the beginning.
The afternoon everything changed
March 13 was an extraordinary day to be running ordinary errands. Two days earlier, the World Health Organization had characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic. That day, the United States declared a national emergency. The country was beginning to experience a kind of uncertainty few of us had ever known. Household supplies were disappearing from store shelves. People were anxious about what would happen next.
I was at the checkout when Peter asked the cashier whether the store had any toilet paper. It didn't. He explained that he had been looking for some all day for himself and his wife. He seemed exhausted, and I could see how discouraged he was. It was difficult enough for anyone to navigate the shortages; for a man in his eighties using a walker, it was especially burdensome.
I offered to help. I walked him back to the car, where I saw Alice waiting with her oxygen equipment, and arranged to look for supplies while they went home. I searched four stores over roughly an hour before finding two packages of toilet paper. I had taken their address and phone number so I could deliver what I'd found.
When I reached their home, nobody answered. I left the supplies at the door and tried to reach them. Later, Peter called and explained that they had fallen asleep after the exhausting day. He thanked me. I subsequently helped them obtain groceries, too.
I wrote about the experience on Facebook that day. It wasn't intended as an announcement of something extraordinary I had done. I was struck by how difficult it had become for vulnerable people to get the things they needed, and by how easily the rest of us might overlook that difficulty. I wanted people to think about their neighbors, especially those who could not easily spend hours searching store after store.
A Facebook post travels far beyond Green Bay
The response was almost immediate and then overwhelming. Notifications poured in. People shared the post, commented, and sent messages. For nearly a week, my phone became practically unusable for ordinary purposes. I eventually got a second phone to separate social media from the rest of my life.
The story reached people far outside Wisconsin. Love What Matters published my account on March 17, Newsner covered it on March 18, and Spotlight Stories published coverage in April. I was surprised by the attention, and often uncomfortable with the language people used to describe me. I hadn't considered helping Peter a heroic act. I believed it was what a reasonable person should do when someone nearby needed help.
But the response revealed something I hadn't anticipated: people didn't only want to read the story. They wanted to help Alice and Peter themselves.
A post office box and more than 5,000 donations
I rented a post office box in Green Bay so people could send supplies and financial contributions for the couple. The packages were filled with the ordinary necessities that had become unexpectedly hard to find: bottled water, toilet paper, soap, baby wipes, feminine hygiene products, paper goods, and other household supplies. Monetary contributions came in as well.
Between 2020 and 2024, I received and coordinated more than 5,000 individual donations on behalf of Alice and Peter. Each represented someone who had heard about two strangers and decided to contribute something of their own.
Especially during the first year, the post office would sometimes call to tell me the box was full. I'd collect the packages and contact Alice and Peter to arrange a visit. I would tell them, in essence, that I had another PO box full of presents and would love to see them again.
It was an extraordinary thing to watch: a personal Facebook post had become a channel through which thousands of people could extend generosity to two individuals they had never met.
Yet the deliveries were only part of what those visits meant to me.
They became my older friends
Over the years, I visited Alice and Peter approximately 15 to 20 times. About a dozen visits were prompted by donations accumulating at the post office. Most visits lasted an hour or two. We'd look through the packages and messages, spend time together, and sometimes attend to small practical things. I might bring in the mail, help with a meal, run an errand, or pick up a prescription.
But I didn't think of myself as a delivery service, and I wasn't their formal caregiver. When I spoke about them to other people, I called them my older friends. That's what they were.
Alice was always happy to see me. Sometimes she became so emotional that I needed to help her adjust or reset her oxygen equipment. I don't want to suggest that I understood every detail of her medical circumstances. What I remember is her emotion and the affection in those visits.
Peter, too, was emotional during our early encounters. As time passed, he became much quieter in person. By around the beginning of 2021, he was largely nonverbal during visits, though we continued to communicate primarily through text messages between them. When we were together, we relied more and more on smiles, hugs, nods, gestures, and hand squeezes.
There is a temptation, when telling a story like this, to fill in all the parts of someone's life you never knew. I don't want to do that. I didn't have long conversations with Alice and Peter about their childhoods, their marriage, or every part of their family history. I knew that they had two children, both of whom had died before I met them, and to my knowledge they had no surviving relatives. We rarely discussed their children, and I would never presume to explain their grief or suggest that my friendship replaced anyone.
What we had was genuine, even without knowing every chapter of one another's lives. Friendship sometimes means being present for the chapter you're fortunate enough to share.
The last visit with Peter
During the last several months of Peter's life, he and Alice lived in the same full-time nursing home in Green Bay. Alice had moved there a few months before his death, and they spent roughly the last three or four months of his life in the same facility.
When I saw Peter for the last time, he was bedridden. It was a dramatic change from the man I'd met using a walker in CVS. But he was alert, coherent, and recognized me fully. Although he could not speak, he responded with smiles, nods, movements of his head and eyes, and squeezes of my hand. He knew I was there.
Before and during that visit, I had a difficult-to-explain sense that it might be the last time I saw him. Nobody had given me a definitive prognosis, and I wasn't responding to a sudden medical crisis. It was an intuition, not a certainty. I was grateful that we had the opportunity to spend that time together.
Peter died in 2023 at age 86, approximately three or four weeks after my last visit. I attended his funeral and personally contributed $10,000 to his memorial fund.
Alice after Peter
Alice had depended on oxygen throughout the years I knew her. When we first met, she often used a wheelchair but could still get in and out of a car. By the time Peter died, her mobility had become far more limited, and she required assistance with transfers.
She struggled after losing Peter. I organized a GoFundMe to help her, and I visited twice after his death. The first visit was shortly afterward, when I checked on her and shared a meal. The second was perhaps six to eight weeks later.
Those visits were different. For years, I had come to see Alice and Peter together, often bringing the latest collection of gifts from people around the country. Now I was visiting Alice without Peter. I was there because she was my friend.
During that second visit, I again had the feeling that it might be our last. I couldn't know that for certain. It was simply the impression I carried away.
Alice died in 2024 at age 87. I attended her funeral and personally contributed $10,000 to her memorial fund. My contributions to the two memorial funds totaled $20,000, separate from the thousands of donations I'd received and coordinated on their behalf.
I include these figures because they belong to the complete history of our friendship, not because I believe generosity should be measured by a dollar amount. The most meaningful parts of those years cannot be captured by financial totals.
The story that continued after the headlines
The internet knew Alice and Peter as the elderly couple I helped during the pandemic. I remember the post office calling because another collection of gifts had arrived. I remember telling them I'd come over. I remember their smiles, Alice's emotion, Peter's increasingly quiet affection, and the hand squeezes that remained when conversation had become difficult.
I remember going to see them when there was nothing to deliver. I remember visiting Peter in the nursing home and being grateful that he recognized me. I remember sharing meals with Alice after he was gone. And I remember saying goodbye to each of them.
The original encounter lasted only minutes. The friendship lasted approximately four years.
I never expected to become part of Alice and Peter's lives when I walked into CVS on March 13, 2020. I certainly never expected thousands of strangers to become part of the story, too. But they did, and their generosity helped create opportunities for us to remain connected.
The world saw an act of kindness. I was fortunate enough to experience everything that came afterward.
I knew them as Alice and Peter. And I will remember them as my friends.