The worst year of my life was the year I turned sixty-three. I lost my wife of forty years in the spring, and my daughter — my only child — in the fall. What her passing left behind was a four-year-old girl named Lily with her mother’s eyes and no one else in the world to take her.
Everyone had an opinion. I was too old. A man alone couldn’t raise a little girl. Maybe she’d be better off with a younger family. I listened to all of it, and then I brought Lily home and made up the spare room with the yellow curtains she liked.
I did not know how to braid hair, so I watched videos at the kitchen table until my fingers learned. I did not know the words to the school songs, so I learned them. I sat in tiny chairs at parent nights, the oldest one there by thirty years, and I did not miss a single one.
There were hard years. Money was tight on my pension. I fell asleep exhausted more nights than I can count. But that girl grew up bright and kind and fierce, and she called me Papa, and she was the reason I got out of bed every single morning of my old age.
Last month, at seventy-nine, I sat in a folding chair at Lily’s college graduation, so proud I could barely breathe. They called her name. She walked up toward the stage in her cap and gown. And then, halfway there, she stopped, and turned around to face the whole crowd.
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