By Toni Bailey |

The house is quiet now. The rhythm of the days has changed, and even the sound of the waves breaking on the shore outside our window seems to hold a different cadence. Last week, my grandmother, Kay, passed away peacefully here at home. She was 87. For the past two years, this house, this coast, was her final harbor, and Ken and I were the lucky ones who got to be her lighthouse keepers.

Two years ago, I was living a world away, on a sailboat in Mexico, lulled by warm winds and azure waters. Then the call came. Grandma Kay had a heart block. The doctor’s words cut through the balmy air with a chilling finality. There was no decision to make, really. You just go. You drop anchor on one life to become the anchor for someone else. That’s what family does. I left Mexico willingly, trading my small boat for a small town on the Oregon Coast, to be with her.

Caring for someone with Alzheimer’s is like navigating a shoreline in a dense, persistent fog. You know the person you love is there, just ahead, but the mist obscures the familiar landmarks of their personality. Some days, the fog would lift for a moment—a sun-break of lucidity where she’d remember a story or my name would land with its old, familiar weight. These moments were like finding a perfect, unbroken sand dollar at low tide—rare, precious, and held with gentle hands.

  • Most days, though, were a slow, patient search for connection in the haze.
  • We found a new language in shared silence, in the comfort of presence alone.

It was during this time, amidst the chaos of caregiving and the quiet intensity of our new life, that Oregon Coast AI was born. It might seem strange, to build a tech company while your personal life is so untethered from logic and predictability. But for Ken and I, it became our anchor. It was a project of creation in a season of loss, a place to build logical structures when life felt anything but. It was our own lighthouse project, a beam of focus in the emotional fog, proving that new journeys can begin even as a beloved one is ending.

"Grief, I'm learning, is not a storm to be weathered, but a tide. It pulls away, leaving the shore bare and quiet, and then it returns, washing over everything. With each return, it smooths the sharpest edges of the rocks, leaving behind something new, something changed."

Her final days were calm. The fog finally settled, and the tide went out for the last time. She passed at home, surrounded by the sounds of the ocean she’d come to know and the love that had brought me here. She reached her harbor, and the light she carried now scatters and reflects in a thousand different ways—in the glint of the sun on the water, and in the love that remains, vast and deep as the Pacific. She is, and always will be, a part of our story.