My grandmother could not walk far. My grandfather had only one name. She wrote imaginary walking guides. He was a gardener. They had next to nothing in common, and yet they were married for life. He loved her until has last breath. What they shared could not be measured or quantified or distilled into numbers or turned into a graph. I could see that now. I was foolish to have tried.
It was plain that I was lost. But how lost?
My grandmother taught me that anything is possible.
My mother taught me that true happiness is a series of infinitely small things that are all too easily taken for granted.
My father taught me that nothing stays the same forever. That the world we make for ourselves is constantly changing, and that it is a better place because of it.

"I never want to leave your side", he said.
It was a statement and a question and a plea and a proposal and a warm breath on a cold day and a desperate heartbeat.
"Yes", she said.
And that was enough.
True to his word, he never did.