The other day Heather and I were at the mall (looking for a swimsuit) when a guy walked up to us. At first we didn’t really notice him, he stood off to one side and we were totally lost at that point. Then he turned to us and asked “who is Abby?”
At this point I was completely confused, then it occurred to me that I was wearing my ABC shirt. As you may have read in previous posts, ABC was Abby Beats Cancer. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, skip this post and go back a few…
Anyway, I finally caught up to the situation and replied, “she was a girl in my school who had cancer, but unfortunately died from it. We wear these shirts to remember her.”
He nodded and answered, “I used to have leukemia.” This obviously came as a shock. This guy was probably middle-aged, slightly balding, and wearing a fancy black suit (why he was wondering around JCPenny’s is beyond me, but that’s not relevant). There isn’t much you can say to a statement like that, so Heather and I didn’t say much. “My sister was an exact marrow match and flew down here. Now all of my marrow is hers. I did beat it. Except now my wife’s under the impression that I should want to go shopping more often.”
It was an amazing and touching moment. We went our separate ways after that, but he has made a fingerprint in my memory, and now I think about how this happened because of Abby and her shirts. 🙂
~Courtney