When a man demanded I leave my seat because my great-niece wouldn’t stop crying, I gathered my things with tears in my eyes. Then, a teenager offered me his business-class seat. 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 a succession of grief, sleepless nights, and endless worry. My daughter died shortly after giving birth to her baby. She fought bravely during labor, but her body couldn’t take it.

In the space of a few 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, didn’t resist. I saw him hold his daughter only once, at the hospital. He stared into her little face, whispered something I didn’t hear, then placed her with infinite gentleness in her crib. His hands were shaking.

The next morning, he was gone.

He didn’t take the little girl home or help with funeral arrangements. He simply left a scribbled note on the chair in my daughter’s hospital room, saying 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, my granddaughter was placed in my arms, and suddenly, she became mine. She became my responsibility, and I became the only parent she had left.

The first time I said her name aloud after my daughter’s funeral, 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.

Today, every time I whisper “Lily” as I rock her to sleep at 3 a.m., I feel like I’m bringing a little bit of my daughter’s voice back to life.

Raising Lily has been far from easy. A baby is expensive in ways I’d forgotten since my own daughter was little. Every penny is gone before I even have time to count it.

I stretch my pension as much as possible and supplement it with odd jobs when I can, babysitting neighborhood children or helping out at the local church food bank in exchange for a few groceries. But most of the time, I feel like I’m just surviving.

Some nights, after I finally get Lily to sleep in her crib, I sit alone at the kitchen table, staring at the bills scattered in front of me and wondering how I’ll make it another month.

Then Lily stirs in her crib, makes those little baby sounds, and opens her big, curious eyes. In those moments, my heart reminds me exactly why I keep going.

She lost her mother before I 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 me from across the country begging me to visit her for a week, I hesitated at first.