Mitt Romney began with a photo of a young him, taken somewhere around age 21, lying on a beach in France and wearing a white t-shirt and jeans. He was propped on his left arm, and surrounded by a heart traced in the sand that read, “I LOVE ANN.”
The former presidential candidate continued with a public love letter, posted on the blogging site Medium, praising his wife for her strength and detailing her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis. The letter was posted shortly after the introduction of the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases in Boston Tuesday.
(Photo: Twitter)
The center is set to open in 2016, and will research cures not only for multiple sclerosis, but for Alzheimer’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and brain tumors.
(Photo: Getty Images)
The political couple has set a goal to raise $50 million for the center at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Ann said she wants “people to have hope that this is going to help, not just them, but future generations,” because she remembers the terror she felt when first researching the disease.
Ann Romney was diagnosed in 1998, and her husband writes that as the couple sat in the waiting room at the neurologist’s, he told her, “We could handle anything, I said, as long as it wasn’t terminal.”
In his letter, Romney called it a miracle that only four years after her diagnosis Ann was able to “run the Olympic torch into Salt Lake City.”
“From one of the wounded, you have become one of the warriors. I could not be more proud of the 15 year old girl I fell in love with almost 50 years ago.”