On the last Sunday afternoon of September, Rhenda Strub was bundled up against the autumn chill for one final day at the ballpark, eating Cracker Jack and sweet and spicy pickles. Another baseball season was ending as it often does in Seattle: abruptly and too soon. There would be no postseason for the Mariners, the only franchise never to have appeared in a World Series. Yet this season, Ms. Strub, 71, found that the opposite was also true: Baseball can help heal a broken heart. After she lost her 27-year-old son, Wyatt, to muscular dystrophy three years ago, she retreated to his room and spent countless hours alone quilting and watching baseball games on television. The constancy of baseball helped to structure her days, but the loneliness only added to her grief. So at the beginning of this season, Ms. Strub bought two season tickets to the Mariners in Section 120, on the first base side, thinking she would regularly go with her loved ones to T-Mobile Park. But her husband doesn’t like crowds, and the rest of her family has busy lives. So she wrote a post on Facebook — with some trepidation, she said, because the “internet can be a cruel place” — asking strangers if they wanted to attend games with her.
This season ticket adventure is part of me finding my way back out — getting out of the house, being around people, and doing something that brings a little joy again,” she wrote. “Baseball helps me heal.” The post went viral in April, inspiring stories in local newspapers and on the radio. Her family worried about her meeting up with strangers. Random people also messaged her with their concerns, offering safety tips. But her inbox was also flooded with messages from people describing their own stories of loss. A child who died. The passing of mothers, fathers and partners. Failed marriages. And a shared love of baseball. “I had so many people contact me with remarkably similar stories,” she said. “They have had some sort of life event that left them feeling unbalanced to deeply grieving. And they didn’t really have someone to go to the game with but loved going to the game.”
By the end of this baseball season, Ms. Strub had attended games with about 30 strangers and found that the people she connected with needed her as much as she needed them. She built an online community, bringing together the people she had met in a private Facebook group, calling the project “Strangers to Friends.” If she couldn’t attend a game — she had to miss a few when her husband, Mike, had brain surgery — she handed off her tickets to strangers who had reached out to her but didn’t know each other. She said she was “gobsmacked” by the reaction to her post. “I have made so many friends this summer,” she said. “I have friends that will be my friends for the rest of my life.”
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing