Upworthy · 19 hours ago

Obama Chokes up Watching a Video From the 24-year-old He Exchanged Letters with When She Was 7

When a 7-year-old named Emily Smith wrote to President Obama after losing her mother to cancer, he wrote back with four sentences that only someone who had carried the same grief could have offered - and then moved on to the next nine letters in the stack. Seventeen years later, Smith had become a registered nurse specializing in mental health, and when she learned her letter now lived at the Obama Presidential Center, she recorded a video saying she felt "peace and pride knowing that my mother's legacy continues to live on." Obama, visibly moved watching it, described how letters like hers arrived each night alongside briefings on war and the economy - and how they kept the weight of those decisions from ever becoming abstract. "Those letters reminded me," he said, "that any decisions I made... affected real people doing amazing things in the face of hardship." What the story quietly holds is this: a small act of attention, offered across an enormous distance of power and grief, can become the thing someone builds a life around.