The Last Dance

My grandfather proposed to my grandmother at a dance hall in 1955. He didn't have a ring, so he gave her the ticket stub from the entrance. She kept it in her jewelry box for sixty-seven years.\n\nWhen she died last spring, we found that ticket stub, yellowed and fragile, preserved in a small frame next to her bed. On the back, in her handwriting: "The night I said yes."\n\nAt the funeral, my grandfather stood up to speak. He was ninety-one years old, frail but fierce.\n\n"She was the best thing that ever happened to me. I was a dumb kid when I met her, working at a gas station, with nothing to my name. But she looked at me like I was the most valuable thing in the world. And I spent the rest of my life trying to deserve that look."\n\nAfter the service, I found him in the bedroom, holding the framed ticket stub.\n\n"I don't know how to be without her," he said. "We were together for sixty-seven years."\n\nThree months later, my grandfather passed away. The doctor said it was heart failure. I think it was a broken heart.\n\nThey're buried together now, side by side. And somewhere, I like to think, they're dancing.