My Tenant Called to Tell Me She Had Cancer and Offered to Move Out So I Would Not Lose Income – I Told Her to Stay and Not to Worry About Rent, and What She Left on My Doorstep 18 Months Later I Will Never Forget

I am sixty-seven years old and I have been a landlord for thirty-one years. I own four rental properties. I am not a wealthy man but I have worked carefully and I have treated my tenants fairly and I have always believed that how you treat people when you have power over them is the truest measure of your character.

I want to tell you about a tenant named Dorothy.

Dorothy Simmons moved into the smaller of my two duplexes in 2014. She was fifty-nine years old, a retired schoolteacher, quiet and neat and unfailingly polite. She paid her rent on the first of every month without a single exception for six years. She kept a small garden by the front steps and left cookies outside my door twice a year, at Christmas and on my birthday, which she had somehow remembered from the lease paperwork.

In March of 2020, Dorothy was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

She called me on a Thursday evening to let me know. She said she wanted to be transparent because treatment was going to be costly and she was not sure what the coming months would look like financially. She said she understood completely if I needed to make other arrangements. She said it in the calm, measured way of someone who had spent a lifetime preparing herself to be reasonable even when the situation was not.

I told her not to worry about the rent. She told me she could not accept charity. I told her it was not charity, it was a business decision, and that finding a tenant as reliable as her would cost me more than six months of reduced rent. Neither of us believed that entirely but we both appreciated the fiction.