How

The power of someone believing in you

Dear friend,

When my great-grandfather enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917, he was a 22-year-old working a stable job for the City of Chicago. Not two years later, he was discharged as a permanently and totally disabled veteran.

Thank God, he found someone who loved and believed in him; my great-grandmother. They married in a Chicago suburb, and started their new life together. It wasn’t easy. My great-grandfather had a very difficult time providing for the family due to his health situation.

Finally, after receiving a bleak medical prognosis, he was told that the Windy City would do him no further good.

To give her husband a fighting chance at life, my great-grandmother willingly left the support of her loving family and moved herself, her husband, and their sons to a completely different climate on the other side of the country.

He outlived the doctors’ prognosis by thirty years.

I never met him, but I did know my great-grandmother. Any time her Chicago ‘Cubbies’ were playing baseball, there she was in her easy chair by the TV. She knew the roster well — every one of ‘em. On our visits to her home, she’d tell us stories of going to the ballpark as a little girl, or the times she got dressed up for strolls along Chicago’s streets, pushing along her sons in a pram.

Mimi was a true lover of Chicago, but she loved her husband more… enough to believe a permanently disabled veteran would make a loving husband and father. She kept the faith even when bills piled up. She didn’t give up, even when Death threatened to come knocking.

She loved him enough to leave everything she knew, for everything she didn’t. And now, because of them both, here I am, writing you this letter.

If you don’t have a list of people who believe in you, go start one today: “People who believe in me…” There’s power in that.

You can put my name on it.

Angela