From Hidden Brain Media, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is My Unsung Hero, stories where one person reached out to help another in a time of need.

Hello, I would like to thank my unsung hero.

He invited me to come over for Christmas because we're both...

...were my unsung heroes. I just want to say thank you.

Today's story comes from Ashley Blas.

When Ashley was seven years old, her mother passed away.

In 2023, nearly 30 years later, Ashley decided to fly to Chicago to visit her mother's grave.

Ashley used a car service to drive her to the cemetery. That morning, a sleek black car with tinted

windows pulled up to her hotel, driven by a man in a suit. When they got to the cemetery,

Ashley got a map from the front desk and began to look for her mother's grave.

The driver stood near the car, giving her space.

And I look around, and I was just overwhelmed.

There were just so many grave sites.

And so I'm trying to figure it out.

I'm just kind of wandering through this cemetery.

And I look up at the driver and he's looking at me and

he could tell that I was getting more and more distressed. And so I look down and all of a sudden

I'm standing on my mother's grave. I could see her name and the driver he calls out. He said,

did you find it? And I just start sobbing. And I'm trying to choke through my tears and tell

him, yes, I found it. And so he runs over with a box of tissue and he looks down at it and he notices that the grave stone

was covered you know you could see that it was a little bit overgrown because it had just been

...