Her story was about as incredible as any I'd ever heard in fact or fiction.
At the age of 12 she ran away from home, fleeing a dangerously abusive mother for what she considered a safer life on the streets.
At 17, still living on the streets, she met a man who did not want to take advantage of her or use her. He simply enjoyed her strength and spirit, and her company.
They fell in love and married before her 18th birthday.
They built a life together in the way the best teams do - every decision they made was based upon whether or not the result of that decision would be mutually beneficial. Their marriage was truly a partnership and they spent their lives accomplishing goals together that they couldn't imagine accomplishing alone.
She went back to school and was able to not only earn a high school diploma, but also a college degree. She became a school teacher.
Forty-eight years after they married her husband passed away.
She was, as you may well imagine, devastated.
She did not stay devastated long though, for she knew her husband would want her to cherish the memory of the life they had created and enjoyed together, but he would not want her to mourn his passing for the rest of her life. He would want her to continue to enjoy life, to go out and embrace life anew, as she would have wanted him to do if she had passed first.
And so she did.
She took time to travel and track down members of her family she had closed the book on almost 55 years ago, and she met a man on one of her adventures who eventually became her second husband.
Then she decided to track down the father she had never known.
She discovered that he lived in the same state she did. Not only did they live relatively close to one another, but he had remarried, and she met siblings she had never known.
The only complication was that her father's current wife was someone she had gone to school with over 45 years ago...which stunned me a little - her 91 year-old father was married to a former classmate of hers?
Wild.
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