SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Time now for "My Unsung Hero," our series from the team at the Hidden Brain podcast. "My Unsung Hero" tells the stories of people whose kindness left a lasting impression on someone else. Today's story comes from Connie Sherburne. In 2020, Sherburne's husband of 31 years, Peter (ph), died in a crash while piloting their small plane. The next morning, she went to their insurance company to transfer his truck's insurance into her name. Because of the COVID pandemic, the office was staffed by just one person.
CONNIE SHERBURNE: So I knocked on the door, and she let me in. And it didn't take her but a few minutes to take care of why I was there. And then when she got done, she stopped, and she looked at me across her desk, and she made sure that I was looking at her, that she had my full attention. And she said, OK. So now that we've finished with that, people are going to stop and ask you, how can I help? And then she gave this pregnant pause, and then she said, let them. And I thought, right, let them, because I was not the type of person that really reached out for a lot of help from a lot of people. But because she said it with such force, it really, really just made sense to me.
So I went home, and right away, I needed help doing a lot of stuff, like I use firewood to heat my house and my plumbing was on the fritz, and a friend came and helped me with that. One of the neighbors actually cooked for me for four years, dinners, and her husband delivered the dinners to me. So if I hadn't gone down to the insurance company and talked to the woman, I would have never never reached out to all these people that helped. In the back of my mind, I kept hearing her voice, you know, let them.
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SHERBURNE: I decided to go back after two or three years to let her know what an impression she'd left on me. And unfortunately, she didn't work there anymore. So I just wanted to tell her how much that meant to me. It was such a little thing for this woman just to say that to me, but she didn't realize what a huge thing it was going to be to help me through all this.
DETROW: Connie Sherburne lives in Escondido, California.
You can find more stories of unsung heroes and learn how to submit your own at hiddenbrain.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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