One good turn deserves another

It’s a powerful photo, worth far more than a thousand words to anyone who sees it.

To Liz Morris, the picture is priceless.

In it, she has climbed into a hospital bed and wrapped her arms around her mom, Nancy Georgina, who is dying of pancreatic cancer. There is a look of contentment and peace on both their faces. It is what love looks like.

Anyone who has lost a parent can get emotional just thinking about it. Many of us would love to snuggle with Mom or Dad one more time.

So, imagine losing that photo.

Morris, who lives in the Halifax area, experienced that pain this week.

“I just don’t know how I’ll ever forgive myself for this,” she told SaltWire Network’s Jen Taplin.

“My mom was my best friend in the world; we were very, very close and I stayed with her 24 / 7 those last three months and they took all I have left of her.”

Morris’s phone — which has that photo and others from Nancy Georgina’s final days — was stolen from a Halifax bar earlier in October. She thought they were lost forever.

Enter a brave stranger.

Mariah Williams heard of Morris’s predicament and thought she had seen such a photo on the screen of a phone a friend had found a few nights earlier.

Williams knew what it was like to lose meaningful images. A few months before, she was mugged and a phone holding photos of her late dad were jeopardized. Her father, Jason Andrew Smith, had been murdered in East Preston, N.S., in December 2019.

“They smashed my phone right in front of me,” Williams said last week. “I literally walked home crying and screaming because I thought I just lost all the pictures of my dad.”

She was able to recover some photos, but others are gone forever. Williams felt compelled to help Morris get the photos of her mother back. That turned out to be quite a challenge. Williams’ friend had sold it to her brother for $400 and he wanted the money back. Williams went to the guy’s house and demanded he hand over the phone, telling the siblings to settle the $400 dilemma.

“I went through a lot,” Williams told Taplin. “I got slapped in the face by my friend and had to go tell her mother, but I got her phone back.”

With her phone back and powered up, Morris became emotional while looking at it with Williams.

“I threw half my body in her vehicle and I just bawled on her shoulder,” Morris said. “It was all a big happy ending and we all hugged, and we all were in tears.”

The happy ending happened because Williams did the right thing, although the slap in the face was unfortunate.

To return the favour, Morris has started a GoFundMe page to raise money to help pay for Williams’ schooling as well as the funeral cost her family is still saddled with.

Would you have gone through the efforts Williams did to help a stranger?

After reading this, will you make sure your cherished photos are backed up?

Make all the memories you can with your loved ones. Hug them like Morris hugs her mom.