Grimm Determination

“Never tell a woman she can’t do something!” – Carol Grimm

Grimm Determination

I could hear and feel the linoleum tile floor squeaking under my crocs right up to the moment the sound became insignificant.  It wasn’t that the sound dissipated.  It was that the focus of my attention was highjacked by a miraculous sight.

Carol Grimm was walking up the hallway just up ahead of me.  That alone was enough to get my attention.  You see, just a short few weeks ago a doctor told Carol that she would likely not be able to walk again!  What else caught my attention, you ask?

The look on Carol’s face!  It was one of single-minded determination!

When I came up to meet her face-to-face, she yielded her focus just enough to greet me by name.  Her eyes were bright and her smile radiant.

“Never tell a woman she can’t do something!”  She said with a lot of jalapeno in her voice.

I could only shake my head in agreement during that, my moment of surprise.

Carol had fallen in her home recently.  For many people her age, such a fall is akin to a death sentence.  And, it would have been easy for Carol to simply listen to the medical naysayers, become discouraged, and give up.  After all, she has faced extraordinary health challenges over the past few years.  Trials enough that she and her husband Jim moved to Utah so they could be close to caring members of their immediate family.

Now, she was walking, with help from those wings of love, toward a physical therapy room. Carol kindly invited me to come along.  We talked and walked the whole last leg toward the beginning point of her exercise station.  When we arrived, she asked me to stay and sit for a while.

I sat.  She worked.  I marveled. She progressed.  We conversed.

I could hear her voice still singing in my head as I left and began a new, solitary walk down the hall.  I could hear and feel the linoleum tile floor squeaking underneath my crocs once again, right up to the moment the sound disappeared, because I had left the rehabilitation hospital.  Still, the sound of Carol’s voice hasn’t dissipated.  It continues to focus of my attention on that same miraculous sight.

Carol Grimm was walking up the hallway just up ahead of me.  That alone was enough to get my attention.  You see, just a short few weeks ago a doctor told Carol that she would likely not be able to walk again!  What else continues to hold my attention, you ask?

Carol’s Grimm determination!