When asked over and over why she was supporting Clinton, Steininger always had the same answer: experience. Clinton had the training and knowhow, she said, and Trump didn’t.

Trump’s presidency is “not going to affect me because I am going to die soon,” she said. “It’s my children and my grandchildren that I am concerned about. Because our country is going to be set back. That’s what Trump promised to do. A woman’s right to choose is out the window. Health insurance he’ll do away with. Same-sex marriage he is opposed to.

“We made a lot of progress in my lifetime and it looked like we’d make a lot more,“ she added. “Now, we are not.”

…

For Steininger, who has been sporting a handmade “Hillary ’16” sign on her walker since the caucus, early voting was the first milestone in her “plan,” as she called it. Beginning with her Christmas letter, she told her friends and family that she decided she had “to stay alive to vote for Hillary.”

With Clinton losing, Steininger said she isn’t sure she’d live long enough to complete that plan. And as the clock ticked past 11 p.m., then midnight and finally 1 a.m., Steininger’s hope faded and her body began folding in on itself.

“I want (Hillary) to know I did what I could and I am sorry,” she said. “There will be a woman voted president of the United States. It won’t be Hillary, but sooner or later there will be a woman voted president.”