When a man demanded that I give up my seat because my little niece wouldn’t stop crying, I gathered my things with tears in my eyes. But then a teenager offered me his seat in business class. What happened next completely changed the expression on that cruel man’s face.
I am 65 years old, and the last year of my life has been a continuous series of losses, sleepless nights and endless worries. My daughter died shortly after giving birth to her child. She fought with all her might, but her body couldn’t take it.
In just a few hours, I went from being the mother of a healthy adult woman to the sole guardian of her newborn daughter.
But the pain became unbearable because of what happened next. My daughter’s husband, the child’s father, couldn’t cope. I saw him hold the baby only once — in the hospital. He looked at her tiny face for a long time, whispered something I couldn’t hear, and then laid her back in the cradle with infinite tenderness. His hands were shaking.
The next morning, he disappeared.
He didn’t bring the girl home and didn’t help organise the funeral. He just left a note on a chair in my daughter’s hospital room, saying that he wasn’t ‘cut out for this kind of life’ and that I would ‘know what to do’.
That was the last time I saw him.
So they placed my granddaughter in my arms — and suddenly she became mine. My responsibility. My life.
The first time I said her name out loud after my daughter’s funeral, I burst into tears. My daughter chose the name herself when she was seven months pregnant. She said the name should be simple, gentle and strong, just as she dreamed her baby would be.
Now, every time I whisper ‘Lily’ while rocking her at three in the morning, it feels like my daughter’s voice comes back to life.
Raising Lily has been incredibly difficult. I had forgotten how expensive a baby is. Every penny disappears as soon as I count it.
I stretch my pension as far as I can and earn extra money by babysitting for neighbours or helping out at the church food bank, where they give me a little food in return. But most of the time, I’m just surviving.
Sometimes, after putting Lily to bed, I sit at the kitchen table, look at the bills spread out in front of me, and wonder how I’m going to make it through another month.
And then Lily stirs, makes her tiny sounds, opens her big curious eyes — and my heart immediately reminds me why I’m doing all this.
She lost her mother before she even had a chance to get to know her. Her father abandoned her when she was less than a week old. She deserves at least one person in this world who will never leave her.
So when my best friend Carol called from across the country and begged me to come stay with her for a week, I hesitated at first.
