[Music] [Applause] [Music] I’m 98 years old and I have nothing left but a melody. I was 22 when the war took me. I left behind a young wife and two baby boys. I promised them I’d come home. But the war, it doesn’t just take lives. It takes time. It takes faces. And when I came back, no one remembered who I was.

 My wife died just 3 weeks before I returned. My sons had grown up calling someone else dad, and me I stood in the doorway suitcase still in hand. While the life I’d fought to come back to quietly closed the door, so I left. I wandered for years, decades. All I had was a tune in my head, a melody I composed in a bomb shelter while holding a dying friend and praying I’d live long enough to play it.

 I found an old piano in an abandoned train station. Broken, forgotten like me. I fixed it. Every Friday I returned and played the same piece, fast, frantic, full of rage and grief and longing. Nobody listened, but I played anyway because that melody was the only thing keeping me alive. Three weeks ago, everything changed.

 A young woman stopped. She stood completely still as I played. And when I finished, she walked up to me with tears in her eyes and said, “Where did you learn that song?” I told her I wrote it 70 years ago. In a war I never really left. She began to cry. My mother, she used to hum that melody every night before bed.

 She said it was the only thing her father left behind. He disappeared and never came home. I asked her mother’s name, she told me. And for the first time in over 60 years, I heard my daughter’s name again. That young woman, she is my granddaughter. I had no idea she even existed. In that moment, everything I lost returned. Not the years, not the war, not the family I missed, but something greater.

Forgiveness, connection, a reason to play this song one more time. I’m not here tonight to win anything. I’m not here for applause. I’m here because after 98 years, someone finally heard my song. I no longer play to survive. I play to remember, to forgive, to love. And tonight, if you hear something familiar in this melody, maybe it’s not just my story.

Maybe it’s yours, too. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Hey, heat. Hey, heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] My name is Elanor. or Whitmore and I’m 92 years old. I know my voice doesn’t carry like it used to. It’s softer now, like the fading notes of an old song.

But if you’ll listen, I have a story to tell. I met James in the summer of 1,945. The war had just ended, and the whole world felt raw broken in places no one could see. I was 12 years old when the bombs fell over London. I grew up hiding in underground stations, clutching a little music box my mother gave me, praying every night that we’d live to see the morning.

 After the war, I took a job cleaning at a small music hall in this city. That’s where I first heard him. James, a young violinist with a worn out suit and a heart stitched together by dreams. He played like he was speaking straight to heaven. I remember sitting on the floor behind the stage curtains, dust clinging to my apron, listening to him pour his soul into every note.

 I fell in love before I ever saw his face. It wasn’t easy back then. Money was tight. Hope was tighter. We courted over cheap tea and stale biscuits, saving every penny for a future we weren’t sure we would have. James played violin on street corners. I played piano at the local church. People threw coins in our open cases.

Not much, but enough for bread, for rent, for the dream of something more. We married in 1951 in a little chapel that smelled of lilacs and rain. I wore my mother’s dress taken in at the sides because the war had made us all a bit smaller. Life tested us. There were nights we went to bed hungry. Years we lost children we never got to hold.

 Jobs lost, homes lost, but somehow never each other. Whenever the world grew too heavy, we turned to the only thing that never failed us, music. He would draw his bow across the strings, and I would find the keys under my fingers, and together we stitched the broken pieces of our hearts back into something whole.

In the summer of 1,967, James got sick. real sick. Doctors said it was his heart worn thin by years of struggle and sorrow. For a time, we thought we’d lose him. But he fought back for me, for the music, for the promises we whispered under bombed out skies when we were just foolish kids. Now he’s 94.

 His hands tremble, his bow waivers. And me? Well, my fingers stumble across the keys more often than not. But every evening, just as the sun dips behind the hills, we sit by the window. He lifts his violin. I find middle C on the piano and we play. Sometimes it’s just scales broken and slow. Sometimes it’s a waltz we used to dance to when our legs were stronger.

But always it’s and I smile because the answer is simple. We never stopped believing. Not in each other. Not in the music. Not in the beauty that still lingers. Even after the bombs, the losses, the long hard winters. Love. Real love doesn’t shout. It doesn’t flash and blaze. It’s the quiet note that hums under your skin when the world falls silent.

 It’s the hand that finds yours in the dark, even when the dark feels endless. Tonight, as I sit here by the piano, watching James tuck the violin under his chin one more time, I realize something. The music never left us and neither did love. Good luck. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Heat. Heat.

Heat. Heat. [Music] Wow. Heat.