How a hospital custodian with a song became a woman's lifelong friend

Hart's mother was hospitalized at St. Thomas with Lewy body dementia, a disease that affects the brain and movement. The two shared their story with StoryCorps, recalling the morning they met, when Hart's mother had just lost the ability to speak.

Hart described walking down what she called a very dark, long hallway, feeling alone and scared, when she ran into Wiggins. He noticed she was crying and asked what was wrong. He invited her in and offered to help however he could.

A hospital worker mopping floors and a visitor sitting with a dying parent do not usually end up as friends for life. But grief has a way of finding unlikely comfort. For Hart, it came from a custodian who stopped his rounds long enough to notice a stranger's tears.

Their friendship outlasted the hospital stay, built entirely on the kind of attention that costs nothing but a few minutes.

Forty-five years on the same hospital floor, and the moment Freddie Wiggins remembers best is not a shift or a task. It is one woman crying in a hallway.