When a man demanded that I leave my seat because my great-niece wouldn’t stop crying, I gathered my belongings with tears in my eyes. Then, a teenager offered me his seat in business class. What happened next made that cruel man’s face turn completely pale.
I am 65 years old, and for the past year, my life has been nothing but a succession of grief, sleepless nights, and endless worries. My daughter died shortly after giving birth to her baby. She fought bravely during labor, but her body couldn’t hold up.
Within hours, I went from being the mother of a healthy, adult woman to the sole guardian of her newborn. What made the pain even more unbearable was what happened right afterward. My daughter’s husband, the baby’s father, couldn’t handle it. I saw him hold his daughter only once, at the hospital. He gazed at her small face, whispered something I didn’t hear, and then placed her with infinite delicacy in her crib. His hands were trembling. The next morning, he was gone.
He didn’t bring the little one home or participate in planning the funeral. He simply left a note scribbled on the chair in my daughter’s hospital room, saying he wasn’t made for that kind of life and that I would know what to do.
That was the last time I ever saw him.
So, my granddaughter was placed in my arms, and suddenly, she was mine. She became my responsibility, and I became the only parent she had left.
The first time I spoke her name aloud after my daughter’s burial, I burst into tears. My daughter had chosen it in her seventh month of pregnancy, saying it was a simple, sweet, and strong name, exactly what she hoped her little one would become. Now, every time I whisper «Lily» while rocking her to sleep at three in the morning, I feel like I am bringing a piece of my daughter’s voice back to life.
Raising Lily has been far from easy. An infant is expensive in ways I had forgotten since my own daughter was small. Every penny vanishes before I even have time to count it. I stretch my pension as far as possible and supplement it with odd jobs when I can, babysitting neighborhood children or helping at the local church food bank in exchange for some groceries. But most of the time, I feel like I’m just surviving.
Some nights, after finally managing to settle Lily in her crib, I sit alone at the kitchen table, staring at the scattered bills in front of me and wondering how I will last another month. Then Lily stirs in her crib, makes those little sounds so unique to babies, and opens her big, curious eyes. In those moments, my heart reminds me exactly why I keep going.
She lost her mother before she even knew her. Her father abandoned her before she was a week old. She deserves at least one person in this world who will never abandon her.
So, when my best friend, Carol, called from across the country to beg me to visit her for a week, I initially hesitated.
