Two ladies sat eating lunch at their local In & Out Burger when they saw an older gentleman eating alone. They then realized he did have some company for his midday meal.

The one woman, Madina Bashizadah, saw the old man had a picture of his wife set on the table next to him, and she soon put the pieces together.

"Automatically, I assumed she wasn't here with us and I started tearing up because it was such a beautiful moment but heartbreaking at the same time," Bashizadah told The Huffington Post.

She and her friend approached the man, but Bashizadah couldn't speak because the scene had her so choked up. "I couldn't even speak to him my friend had to talk to him for me it was the sweetest thing ever!" she tweeted.

The older gentleman was "happy and excited to talk" about his wife and the story of how they met, fell and love and got married with the two women and other restaurant customers that approached him. Bashizadah recounted the story to The Huffington Post:

"We found out that she was his sweetheart, his wife who passed away five years ago. They met at 17 but the war had kept them apart. He had searched for her for 10 years and one day as he was telling his barber the story, the barber calls his daughter in and it ends up being her. They were married instantly and it lasted 55 years until she passed. He takes her photo everywhere. On one side of the laminated phot it's him and her sitting on a couch together and on the back it as a photo of him and her, side by side when they were young. Goes to show you true love does exist."

The photo Bashizadah took of the old man has been favorited more than 12,000 times on Twitter and has appeared on file-sharing community websites such as Reddit and Imgur.