Marriage is not only a loving union between two people, it also means that
two families come together and form a bond.
Sometimes this inevitability goes smoothly - other times, not so much.
It may take time for everyone to get to know each other. But sometimes, it
isn't until it's too late that we learn to appreciate the people around us.
When Scott Mann met his mother-in-law for the first time, he felt
immediately that they would hardly become best friends.
But seven years into his marriage, life took a dramatic turn. Scott's wife
was diagnosed with leukemia. She was only 30-years-old.
It was out of this tragedy that Scott learned something very important,
which he now wants help to share further.
Here's Scott's heartbreaking letter:
This is Sharon.
She taught me it’s important work to see someone for who they are and not
what you expect.
When I first met my former mother-in-law I had a hard time understanding
her thick south Virginia accent. And she seemed a little bossy in that southern
passive aggressive polite way. But I knew she was important to the love of my
life, so I accepted her grudgingly as some of us do when family is forced on
us.
After 7 years I still didn’t really know her.
When my former wife got leukemia at 30, when they gave her a 10% chance to
live a year, when our world was shattered and changed forever, Sharon very
quietly and very firmly stepped into the role she was born for. She moved, with
her dependent Vietnam vet husband, into our house and became my wife’s
caretaker too.
Over a period of two years she bought most of the groceries, cooked almost
every meal, did most of the laundry and cleaning, drove both dependents to
almost every one of the 300+ doctor appointments, sorted tens of thousands of
pills, and made sure they were all taken on time at every hour every day.
And she did this when she herself was diagnosed with cancer in the middle
of caring for everyone else. When she was getting a mastectomy. When she is
going through chemo.
She hums when she works. She talks to herself when there’s no one to
listen, and she goes about every day with humility and grace.
I took this photo before I left for work one day. She didn’t know I was
there.
This, friends, is what greatness looks like in a quiet
moment. Waiting on oatmeal to cook for her daughter for the 300th time since
she got sick. Her hair was gone from her own chemo. She refused to quit caring
against all odds.
Not everyone gets to have a real-world superhero in their
lives. And for this I was filled with gratitude every day.
I think we can all learn something from Scott's moving
story. There will always be people in life, some of them perhaps in our own
families, that we find difficult to love. But keeping an open mind is
imperative: after years of being annoyed at a family member he'd 'inherited',
Scott finally realized what an incredible woman his mother-in-law truly was.
Please help him share and spread his message.
This post was republished from en.newsner.com You can
find the original post here.