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.

I just want to say thank you.

Today's story comes from Karen Mueller.

In January 2020, comes from Karen Mueller.

In January 2020, Karen's father passed away. Her mother decided to downsize from their big house with a three-car garage

to a retirement home.

On a weekly basis, Karen... car garage to a retirement home.

On a weekly basis, Karen would drive two hours from Ohio to Indiana

to prepare her parents house for sale, fixing the shutters,

repainting the dining room,

scraping mold off the roof.

She also had to sort through decades of her parents' belongings.

So we started getting boxes and going through all the items in the house and we had our trash

pile, our let's take this to the retirement apartment and let's give this away.

So they had these German Stein.

There were encyclopedias.

We had these time life series on the cosmos.

There was a Pac-Man machine, a pink-pong table. They had two Christmas trees.

Old black and white photos from my great aunts.

...