Our families lived more than 450 miles away, so a few weeks before Thanksgiving one year, my husband and I decided to invite a guest over1the holiday. I called a senior center in the Dallas area and they2Ilse, a woman I imagined would be quiet and good-natured. When seeing her, I was wrong. Ilse was a stubborn 78 -year-old lady, who favored spending time at the center3she had her own apartment.
By the end of the Thanksgiving evening, we felt as if she were an old friend. Two weeks later, I invited her to lunch. The more time I spent with Ilse, the more she became like my grandma, always full of energy. Since I was the only one left in her life, I felt4for her. I soon became her personal Uber driver (minus the fee), and also helped her hire a5. As the days went on, Ilse seemed more disconnected than before. Late one afternoon, she called from the emergency room to tell me she had6over her coffee table. After I got there, the doctor7she had suffered a mild stroke(中风).
During the next few days, I8 by her apartment, sadly finding that she was so weak. And she was no longer the9Ilse I knew. At the end of the week, I received an early-morning call from her caregiver. "Please come over now," her voice matter-of-fact. "She's passed away." But I was too shocked to cry.
The morning after Ilse's death, I pulled her10out of my file cabinet. Ilse had11I take a copy of it a year earlier. I read through it and12when I saw my name. She had left me $ 50,000. I didn't13her saying anything about that. 14, I would have insisted she donate the money to charity or give it to a friend she had known longer. Ilse was a friend I'd helped out of loyalty and15, not with the expectation of being paid. I opened an account in her honor. Over the next 20 years, Ilse's16grew and gave me the opportunity to17funds in her name to a cause she cared about deeply: children. Various families and charities18from her donations. It is beyond my expectation that a19I'd taken years before when I placed a call to the senior center and meet Ilse made my life richer and made me have a new understanding of20.
