I don’t think her name was Anna. I just made that up because I don’t remember her name. I spoke with scores of people over the last couple of weeks over in Pennsylvania, knocking on doors for Hillary and Katie. It’s hard to remember any one person’s name.
I should have remembered her name. She is the election.
She lives in a second-floor apartment. The only way up is around the back, up a flight-and-a-half of very rickety wooden stairs to a tiny porch that I feared would never hold my weight. I came to ask “Anna” if our candidates could count on her support, and if she had a plan to vote.
Anna appears not to have been well educated. She is dirt poor. She came to the door in a dirty night dress that seems to be her everyday attire.
She is fighting breast cancer.
She is caring, by herself (the father being long gone), for her two young children, one of whom is developmentally disabled.
Her father is in hospice, due to die any day from his cancer.
She may be the bravest woman I ever met. I humbly asked if she was for Hillary et al. and she beamed and said she and her father would both vote for all Democrats. She prayed that her father would survive long enough to get his absentee ballot in.
Humbled and a bit ashamed for all my privileges and fortune, I meekly offered that it was wonderful that she would vote despite how ill and how busy she was.
“Oh,” she said, “there’s always time to vote.”