Yes, Don Cardoza was my friend and in some ways, my salvation. But to characterize his April 4 death as merely a personal loss does a great disservice to the man I admired so much.

You’ll see what an impact Don had on SouthCoast by how many people — and how many different types of people — show up Sunday at Dartmouth’s Wellness Resource Center for a “Celebration of Don’s Life.”

Don Cardoza was selfless and caring, his compassion coming from someplace deep in the largest heart I’ve ever known.

“Healing is the noblest work” reads a sign on the wall of the Wellness Resource Center. It is not an empty platitude. It was the No. 1 lesson Don made sure staff and clientele took away from the center he founded in 1986.

I first met Don in 2001 when I interviewed him for “Portraits,” a column I was writing for The Standard-Times. I was instantly struck by his compassion for the sick and those in pain.

I asked him how he came to do what he was doing.

“I was involved in a bad auto accident when I was in my 20s,” Don told me. “Face, back and neck injuries; I was out of action for three years.”

Two things happened during that time, and each was revelatory in its own fashion. He began seeing a chiropractor/massage therapist and saw first-hand how massage was a great pain-management tool. “I saw people besides myself getting pain relief on a regular basis,” he said.

It was also in that three-year period that Don took up martial arts — he eventually became a Black Belt Aikido Master — and the two disciplines provided a powerful recuperative combination, he said.

Don had discovered his life’s work. Healing from the inside, healing from the outside, was a great one-two punch and with wife Carole at his side, Don put it into practice at the WRC where he offered both massage therapy and Aikido — which, appropriately, means “way of harmony.”

Yet, as we talked that day, little did I know that our lives would become inextricably linked less than three years later when, in September of 2004, I had a debilitating stroke.

One of the first faces I remember at the New Bedford Rehabilitation Hospital where I spent two months was Don’s. He came as soon as he heard the news. Having once been a stroke nurse and head of Brandon Woods Rehab unit, he was uniquely qualified to deal with my problems.

I can’t begin to tell you how much of my recovery is due to the ongoing treatment I’ve received from Don and his team starting then and continuing to this day.

What has made his Wellness Resource Center so successful is that Don demanded the same level of caring and dedication from his students as he did from himself. Part of each student’s pledge, post-graduation, was to go forth and perform community service.

For more than a quarter century, the center has provided tens of thousands of hours of service in nursing homes, senior centers, assisted living facilities and churches of all faiths. Working with cancer and AIDS patients, people with ALS, MS and stroke, indeed anyone with chronic pain, Don and his team were “Paying it Forward” long before that concept/movie was even thought of. It’s no accident he was named The Standard-Times Dartmouth Man of the Year in 2001.

But he wasn’t in it for the accolades. Don genuinely cared about people; he wanted to help them heal; he wanted to ease their pain.

Yes, losing Don Cardoza is a tremendous personal loss but his death is much more: It’s a loss for the entire SouthCoast. More than merely a good man, Don Cardoza was a noble man in an often ignoble world.

We are all poorer for his passing.