I think about my grandparents all the time.

My grandparents, Frank and Mary, were a team. It’s almost impossible for me to talk about one without talking about the other.

They met as teenagers at Central High School in Louisville, Kentucky. My grandfather was rushing to class when he saw my grandmother sitting on the stairs fixing the hem of her skirt. He stopped mid-step and stared.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Nothin’,” was all he could manage.

Grandpa loved telling that story. He’d laugh every time.

He was so taken with Mary that he canceled a date he already had with another girl and took her to a school dance instead. They danced to “Rum and Coca-Cola.”

Years later, after Grandmommy had died, Grandpa told me that on the walk home from that first date, they became “kissing bandits.”

Step. Kiss. Step. Kiss.

I laughed.

“Grandpa, you mean to tell me Grandmommy was kissing on the first date?!”

“Well, yeah,” he said, laughing, as if everybody kisses on the first date.

They were teenagers when their story began, but even then, Grandpa seemed to know what he wanted. At seventeen, he wrote sixteen-year-old Mary a letter describing the life they would have together—a family, travel, adventure and a life deeply woven together by love.

Grandmommy kept that letter for 70 years.

More importantly, Grandpa kept his promises.

They built the life he told her they would build.

Love Stays

There is something I’ve come to understand about love because I watched them live it.

Love isn’t just a feeling. It’s not passion or a fleeting moment. Love is a choice and an action. It’s choosing someone day after day and building a life together.

My grandparents chose each other.

And they chose me.

My mother and biological father never married. When he walked away, my grandparents stayed.

And when I say they stayed, I don’t mean they were simply present for the important occasions in my life.

They were there.

Their home was a second home to me. Their presence was simply something I could count on.

When I was considering graduate school, Grandmommy was adamant that I should go. I wasn’t sure how I would manage it while working full time and raising a five-year-old as a single mother.

She told me, “Lisa, you can go to school, and at the end of two years, you’ll have a degree. Or you can do nothing. Two years is going to pass, regardless.”

She was right.

But she and Grandpa didn’t just tell me I could do it. They helped me do it.

My MBA classes were every Monday night from 6 p.m to 10 pm. I would leave work and go to class. Grandpa would drive from Uniontown to Akron, pick my daughter up from school, keep her overnight and take her back to school the next morning.

Monday after Monday.

Two years passed.

At the end of those two years, I was a full-time worker and a single mother.

And I had an MBA.

Building a Life

My grandparents also knew how to live.

They loved to travel, and they did it intentionally. I traveled with them to Niagara Falls, Toronto, the Outer Banks, Palm Springs, French Lick, the Isle of Palms, Aruba, Kentucky and more places than I can possibly list.

Those trips helped shape my own love of travel and adventure.

Christmas is still my favorite holiday in part because of them. As a child, I couldn’t wait for Grandmommy and Grandpa to arrive on Christmas Day. Their van would be so loaded with presents for all of us grandkids that I’m not sure Grandpa could see out of the back window. And every year, Grandmommy gave me a special Christmas ornament.

Now, when I travel, I collect ornaments of my own. Every Christmas when I bring them out, the memories come with them.

There’s Never Been Any Doubt

On May 24, 2023, I sat beside Grandpa’s hospital bed in Arizona.

Grandmommy had died five years earlier.

As I held his hand, I thought about more than fifty years of having them in my life.

Grandpa and I sat together in a comfortable silence. I wanted to say something profound—something big enough to capture what he and Grandmommy had meant to me.

Finally, I said, “Grandpa, I feel like I should say something.”

But how do you summarize a lifetime of someone being there?

Grandpa smiled.

“Lisa, it’s already been said. Our story began a long time ago and has been written through the years. We loved you from the moment we knew you would be. And we have been proud of you ever since.”

He was right.

It had already been said.

It was written in Fridays when they came to get me.

It was written in Monday-night drives between Uniontown and Akron.

It was written in letting an exhausted mother sleep upstairs while they took care of her baby.

It was written in trips and Christmas ornaments and advice and ordinary dinners.

And eventually, it was written in me sitting beside his hospital bed, holding his hand.

I simply said, “Grandpa, I so love you.”

He smiled.

“Lisa, there’s never been any doubt.”

He died a few days later.

I still miss them both. I still get emotional when I talk about them. Joy and tears live together in my memories of them.

But I see them in the life I’ve built.

I see them in my love of family and Christmas and travel. I see them in my desire to experience life now instead of waiting for someday. And I see them in the way I try to be there for the people I love.

I’ve thought about what I’d like people to say about me when my own life is over.

There are plenty of things I hope they’d remember.

But one of the things I would most like said about me is very simple:

She showed up.

Because they did.