I'd never have guessed it, but a hair appointment changed my life, forever and for always.

Not my own, mind you. It's been a long time since I had enough hair to worry about, not that I ever thought about it much in the first place. But one day I found myself offering to help out an old lady who lived right next to the construction trailer I was working out of. And she happened to accept.

Her name was Edith Wilson Macefield, and from the day I met her, nothing was ever the same. Edith owned a little run-down house on a run-down block where developers had decided to build a big shopping mall. They bought up the whole block, but Edith refused to sell. They offered her a million dollars and she told them to take a hike. Overnight it became a big national story in the US.

So, just like in the Pixar movie "Up", I was hired as the construction superintendent, and we started to build the mall up around her house. There's a heck of a lot of noise and dirt and to-do when you're building a shopping mall right next to someone's home, so like I said, I'd offered to help her out any way I could while we were creating havoc all around her.

The morning that she asked me to drive her to her hair appointment, I didn't think too much of it. But once we got to talking, we didn't stop. For the next few weeks, I'd wander over to her house, which wasn't 20 steps from my trailer, and we'd yakkity yak about everything and nothing, just like two old neighbours hanging on the fence, passing the time of day.

At one point, I worked up the courage to ask her why she didn't accept the million bucks and move. The newspapers had made her out to be a local hero, standing up to the evil developers and the forces of change. But Edith told me a very different story.

She said she had been living in Europe but came back to America to take care of her sick mother. Her mother's only wish was to die in her own home, not in some old-age facility; and now that was Edith's wish as well.

"So it's not what people think, is it?" I asked her.

She turned toward me, with a wry, knowing smile, and said, "It's never what people think."

As time went by, and Edith's health started to fail, I found myself at her home more and more. Pretty soon I was taking her to all her doctor appointments, cooking her meals, changing her bedding, doling out her medicine. Sometimes, in the course of just trying to get through the day, I'd find myself helping her out a little too much - I'd see her struggling to feed herself, so I'd grab the fork and start to feed her, and she'd swat the fork out of my hand.

"I'm not helpless, you know!" she’d bark at me. And I learned an important lesson in dealing with our ageing loved ones: You may need to take over their lives, but you may not take away their dignity. You have to help, but you have to help with respect.

Her old oven would get as hot on the outside as it did on the inside, which is why I wouldn't let her near it. But when I tried to talk her into getting a microwave she refused – "the wiring in this old house isn't made for microwaves," she'd argue, which was patently absurd; I knew she just didn't want to admit that she was afraid she couldn’t learn to use it.

But it occurred to me: getting the microwave wasn’t something I wanted to do for her. It was for me. It would make my life easier, and it would make me feel less guilty if I left her to fend for herself for a day or two. I realised that a lot of the things we do for people when they get older aren't for them;
they're for ourselves. That's another important lesson to remember.

When Edith passed, I was inconsolable. I had come to love this woman like a member of my own family. Since then, though, a lot of people asked me why I did so much for a woman I didn’t even know.

I guess one reason is that I was brought up to believe that you do the right thing. I was lucky enough to have an incredible wife and kids who supported me in that - my teenage daughter even said she was proud of me, and how many dads can say that?

But there's another reason, one I wasn't even aware of until I was in the middle of it all. Just as Edith was starting to fade, my own dad was stricken with Alzheimer's. As I dealt with him through those painful days, all I kept thinking was: Thank you, Edith. It's a good thing you came along when you did, to teach me what to do now.

A lot of people think that Edith was lucky to have me in her life. But I know I was the lucky one. Lucky, because of the lessons I learned from her. Lessons of strength and courage and dignity, and what it means to give of yourself, when it matters most.

Edith taught me that you never know where the lessons you need to learn are going to come from.

Barry's book, Under One Roof: How a Tough Old Woman in a Little Old House Changed My Life, is available now from Amazon and we have ten copies of it for people who post on the thread.