My grandfather is lost. Not in the confused elderly person kind of way, but the gut wrenching, heart broken, "I just lost the love of my life" kind of way.

He sits alone in his house with only his small, scruffy Scottish terrier dog named Sasha, his coveted double stuffed Oreo cookies, and his memories to cheer him up after his great defeat.

Afraid, broken, lost.

Rewind.
The day is March 16, 2015. Granddad is sitting beside a frail woman who is currently drowning in her own lungs. The sound coming from her pale dried lips is something resembling that of a crunching leaf on the pavement every time her lungs reached their maximum inhaling capacity. Every breath is considerably more shallow than the last.

This has been going on for 3 days.

He’s lost hope

A single tear runs in a thin stream down granddad’s cheek as he feels the pain of an anvil weighing heavily on his already barely beating heart.

The elderly woman’s hand continues to grasp his even as the rest of her body is limp with death approaching. I sit on the other side of her singing her favorite Christian praise songs while my aunt prays with all the strength she can muster after over a week of staying awake at night with this dear old woman.

We've lost hope.

“I can’t live without her,” Granddad says whilst shaking his head. “I don’t know how.”

Rewind some more.
My grandfather at the young age of 22 is awestruck by a 17 year old young lady by the name of Dell. This woman is extremely visually appealing with a smile that can kill and beauty that can only be matched by the stars in the clear night sky. Holding her pale, petite fingers in his convinces him that miracles are, in fact, possible.

"I do."

Now, at the age of 84, sitting in the very front row of his wife's funeral, he looks back on a time 62 years ago when he said those two words that would change his life forever. Watching me, his youngest granddaughter, sing his wife's favorite song on stage in a time of grief and loss cannot be easily matched with any other time in his life.

Cowardly, detached, lost.

His words of encouragement to me consisted of few words but I will remember them forever.
"Make your grandma proud."

As I reminisce on my mere 17 years of being on this earth, I try to remember a time when my grandmother was anything but supportive towards me and her other family members.

There is none.

But still, my grandfather seems lost.

And then it hits me. She has never let him lift a finger around the house in all of their 62 years together. Even as her body was ridden with ovarian cancer, she treated him as royalty. She valued him as if he were gold. She always understood him.

Affectionate, delicate, strong.

I watch as he gently places his hand over the ground that she lies beneath. I watch the same thin stream of tears run down his cheek. I watch as his personality slowly deteriorates.
I watch as he walks into the church. I listen as he says "I'm getting better," when someone asks the empty question "How are you doing?" I see a certain fire in his eyes that wasn't there before.

It's her.

Fearless. Faithful. Found.