Anne loved and cared for her mother’s friend with all her heart, even when the woman’s own son didn’t bother. When the older woman died, Anne paid her son a surprising — and shocking — visit in his office.
Nina and Viola were two older women who wished they had met years ago. “We would have been the best of friends!” Nina said, extending her tired hand to Viola.
Instead, they had met each other in the final months of their lives, bedridden next to each other in the palliative care unit of a hospital, waiting gracefully for their time to come.
The two women had led lives that were not very different from each other. They both had married early, lost their partners early, and sacrificed the big and small pleasures and thrills of youth to raise their children. Nina had one son, Richard, and Viola had a daughter, Anne.
“I think I’m going to die without getting to see my son, Viola,” Nina would cry silently.
Richard was the manager of the million-dollar family business that his parents had built. He had only ever visited his mother at the hospital once; to push her to write a will and give up the estate.
Nina had refused, and Richard had stormed out of the hospital, muttering, “See if I ever come back now!”
He never came back, indeed.
“Wasn’t your mother a janitor or something? What did she leave you? A castle?”
For the last few weeks of her life, Nina had only two people in her life to call her own: her friend Viola and her daughter Anne. Viola’s chatter and sense of humor dulled Nina’s pain, but it was the presence of Anne that brightened her day.
Anne worked at a flower shop around the corner, and sometimes, she took up her mother’s old weekend job of mopping the floors for a boutique at the mall.
Unlike Richard, Anne would visit her mother every single day. And she had formed a rather special bond of friendship with Nina.
“Don’t call me aunt Nina. You, only you, can call me Neens!” she had said to Anne.
When Anne visited, she often brought flowers from the shop. One for her mother, but always two for Nina.
And there was nothing Anne wouldn’t help Nina with. The young woman would comb her hair, take her out for some sunlight, and even clean up after her.
“You’re my second mom, Neens!” Anne would say and kiss the wrinkles on the woman’s forehead.
Anne felt blessed to be around both women and learned some of the most valuable lessons in strength and grace from their stories.
And when she got a call from the hospital one day, she came rushing to learn that her mother had passed away just a few minutes ago. Anne held onto Nina’s feeble arms and wept like a child. “I have no one. I have nothing!” she cried.
Even in the depth of that grief, Anne remembered to feed Nina dinner, apply jasmine oil to her hair for restful sleep, and give her medication before leaving for the night.
The next morning, she learned that Nina, too, had breathed her last in her sleep.
After 2 days of being in shock, Anne broke down as she laid a fresh bunch of flowers on the graves of two of her favorite women in the world. She couldn’t bring herself to leave the cemetery.
A few steps away from her, Richard was standing impatiently at his mother’s grave, eyeing his watch and calling his chauffeur every other minute.
“I wonder what that other woman’s daughter is going to gain by crying her eyes out like that,” he thought, looking at Anne. “She’s talking to the grass and laying flowers like it means something!” Richard shook his head and turned to leave.
He did not expect to see Anne in his office a few days later.
“You? What are you doing here?” the man asked Anne in a condescending tone.
“I’ve come here to claim my inheritance,” Anne said coldly.
“Your WHAT?” Richard laughed and stroked his chin. “Wasn’t your mother a janitor or something? What did she leave you? A castle?”
Anne turned to the man coldly and said, “Oh, let me clarify. I have come here to claim the inheritance that YOUR mother left me.”
Richard seemed to pause for a second in shock before he burst into mocking laughter.
“Yeah, right. That old woman refused to pass on her wealth to her own son, and she just happened to give it to the daughter of some woman she shared a hospital room with! Good joke!”
Anne calmly opened the folder she was carrying and showed Richard a document. She waited and watched as the man’s ego trickled down to shock and anger.
“I can’t believe she did this…that crazy woman!” Richard screamed, forgetting that the employees in his office were watching.
“Don’t you say another demeaning word about my Neens! You never knew her value, so you don’t deserve her kindness. You may not have cared about her, but I did,” Anne snapped at the man.
“Well played!” Richard slow-clapped sarcastically. “So you give a few foot rubs, and you get a lifetime of easy money—”
“I’m not here to collect the wealth she left me. But I will work as hard as I can to find a deserving cause to put all that wealth into. Now, if you’ll just do your job, show me to the safety deposit box and step back, please. I’d like to make sure that it’s all indeed safe from all greedy eyes.”
Speechless, Richard followed Anne’s instructions and opened the safety deposit box that was assigned to his mother. His eyes gleamed with shock and shame as he saw what was inside. There was indeed an antique box full of jewelry next to several neatly stacked bunches of cash.
Richard couldn’t look Anne in the eye ever again. At that moment, he regretted only the money that he lost. But he had years ahead of him to realize the true loss of a doting mother, whom he had neglected all his life.