Son of a Great Man, Brother of a Great Woman

When my love was a little boy he would walk down the street and people would recognize him and come up to him and say, "Your father was a great man." They knew that my love had lost both his father and his mother at a very young age, but they also knew just how kind and generous his father had been. The father of my love would literally give you the coat off his back, and he did this once during the winter. He would deliver coal to families he knew were poor and without. He was a great man and when people would see the beautiful sad face of my love, they would remember just how great his father was. My love had a sister who was only a little older than he was. As a girl without parents, she would have the lessor opportunities of two children with very few opportunities. But children of great men seem sometimes destined to create opportunities where there are none. My love's sister would quickly be married off after the death of her father. She would be expected to raise her little brother as her son. In the house of her in laws, she would know hunger and great frustration. Even though her own life would not turn out as her own father might have wanted and surely not as her mother might have wanted, over the course of years, her great love for her little brother would work miracles. It was her love her that would spread across several continents through her little brother to others.  She would do without to give her little brother an education and a future. Her brother loved her so and came to see that without her, he would have had nothing. He was lucky to be the son of a great man and the brother of a great woman. There life was not built on sand but the indestructible stone created by love and suffering and loss.