It was comforting to be this close to the surface of the ocean and gaze at the intimate nocturnal details of its swelling and ebbing. And as she listened to the faraway breakers rolling up onto the beach, she became aware of another sound entwined with the intermittent crash of waves: a vast horizontal whisper across the bossom of the sea, carrying an ever-repeated phrase, regular as a lighthouse flashing: Dawn will be breaking soon. She listened a long time: again and again the scarcely audible words were whispered across the moving water. A great weight was being lifted slowly from her; little by little her happiness became more complete, and she awoke. Then she lay for a few minutes marveling the dream, and once again fell asleep.

Paul Bowles (Up Above the World)

In 1974, Dan Jury was only 23 years old when he made a choice that changed his life—and would also change America. He took his grandfather Frank Tugend, 81, out of a nursing home and welcomed him into his small apartment to care for him day and night. What seemed like a personal gesture became something much bigger. For three years, Dan cared for him with patience and love, while taking intimate, honest photographs of their daily life together. From those images came Gramp, the book published in 1978 with his brother Mark, which sold over 100,000 copies and helped spark the hospice movement in the United States. In the 1970s, everyone thought Dan was wasting his youth. Instead, he chose to stay. To listen. To be present. Years later, he said that the time spent with his grandfather taught him more than any job or relationship ever could. Frank, an immigrant and survivor of the Great Depression, was never a burden. He taught Dan the strength of vulnerability, the value of family, and the dignity of accepting help. Their photographs tell a simple yet powerful truth: caring for someone is not a sacrifice—it is a profound exchange of love. This story changed the way people see aging and the end of life, showing that dying at home, surrounded by affection, is far more humane than doing so in loneliness.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6982734-gramp

“You don’t understand this when you’re younger but at some point, you cease doing things, cease creating new memories,” he thought aloud. “You are stuck in a rocking chair. And all you have are your memories. Those beautiful droplets of color you’ve managed to steal from the rainbow. And you go back to them over and over and over, like a Catholic praying the rosary. You dig in deep, sifting through decades, years, seasons, weeks, hours, and seconds of your life, trying to figure out what it all meant. I wanted to come back to you. I wanted to see you in color, to grasp my own little rainbow.”

― Moses Yuriyvich Mikheyev, Vanishing Bodies: An Epic Science Fiction Thriller