I was scrolling through old messages the other day. Not looking for anything. Just killing time the way you do when you only have a few minutes and don’t want to get into anything.
And then one caught my attention:
August 12, 2020.
A message from a woman named Mary.
“I passed my exit exam!”
And below it, my response: “Woo hoo!! Congrats!! You got this shit!!”
And then hers: “Yes I do. Thank you for inspiring me.”
It made me stop and think.
Mary was what some people would call rough around the edges. That’s the nice version. Less polite people had less polite words for her.
She was loud. She was blunt. She attracted bad luck like it was her full time job.
Scott and I used to listen to her stories and look at each other like, there’s no way this actually happened. But enough of them ended up checking out that we came to believe she was just a magnet for crazy shit happening.
Scott was the quadriplegic I lived with during what I call my waking coma years. I was his private CNA. Mary worked for the agency that sent aides to his house and she was his favorite.
Not because she was the most polished or the most professional but because she treated him like a human being. She didn’t talk to him like a patient. She took his shit and gave it right back. She didn’t just check boxes and leave. She actually gave a shit, and in that world, that’s rarer than you’d think.
During those years, I wasn’t doing much of anything. I was just existing. Waking up, living like I’d given up, and doing it all again the next day. Living in Scott’s house and calling it a life because it was easier than admitting I’d stopped trying.
And Mary was right there, watching all of it.
She watched me sit in that rut. She watched me get restless. She watched me make the decision, at 43 years old, to go to nursing school.
I didn’t sit her down and tell her she should do it too. I didn’t coach her. I didn’t give her a speech. I just made a choice in front of her.
And apparently, that was enough.
Not long after I started school, she enrolled too. She was about my age. Same kind of life behind her. Same kind of bad decisions stacked against her. And she did it. She passed. She became a nurse. And from what I heard and saw, a really good one.
Here’s the grown up part that doesn’t and won’t ever make sense.
Mary got diagnosed with cancer and died.
Not decades later after a long career and a retirement party and all the things you’re supposed to get when you finally do the hard thing.
She did the hard thing. She changed her life. She got there.
And then she didn’t get to keep it.
I don’t have a framework for that. I don’t have three steps and I can’t make it feel right because it won’t.
But I keep going back to that screenshot.
Because most of us will never know. We’ll never get the text. We’ll never see the proof that something we did actually mattered. We just walk around wondering if any of it counted.
Mary sent that message in August 2020. She didn’t have to. She could’ve just moved on. But she picked up her phone and told me I was part of it because that’s just the type of person Mary was.
That screenshot is sitting in my phone right now because six years ago, a woman who most people underestimated decided to tell me something most people don’t get to hear.
It’s a good reminder that somebody’s probably watching you right now. Somebody you’d never expect. They’re not gonna tell you. They’re just gonna watch what you do next.
And you don’t know how much time either of you has to do something with it.
I’m keeping that message.