Tomorrow is my grandparents’ anniversary.

It is also Wednesday, which means I have been thinking about what I want to write for Winning Wednesday tomorrow.

Somewhere in that process, those two things collided.

I started thinking about winning. About what becomes visible with enough time and distance. About the things we inherit from people long after they are gone.

And, naturally, I started thinking about my grandparents.

Losing them has been the hardest loss of my life.

I know I am not alone in that. They were deeply loved—not only by their family, but by an entire community of people who knew them, admired them, learned from them, worked beside them, laughed with them, or were simply fortunate enough to have their lives intersect with theirs.

Time has not made me love them less.

If anything, it has done the opposite.

With time has come clarity.

Wisdom.

Perspective.

And somehow, more love than I even knew I had when they were here.

That may be one of the strangest gifts of grief: realizing that love does not stop accumulating just because someone is no longer physically present to receive it.

I get to keep loving them.

And I get to keep compounding that love with everything I continue to understand about what they gave us.

My grandparents were not simply two incredible people.

Together, they created an entire world for the people they loved.

They called that world family.

My grandfather was one of the strongest men I have ever known.

He was a natural leader. The kind of man people trusted. The kind of man other people looked toward when something needed to be done.

But beneath all that strength was something remarkably tender.

So much of what he did in his life was centered around one thing:

He wanted Lucy to have an amazing life.

My grandmother was his muse.

He adored her.

And nobody really expected her to outlive him.

Including her.

He was the strong one.

The protector.

The leader.

The person who seemed somehow permanent.

But she did outlive him.

And then I had the privilege—and sometimes the heartbreak—of watching my grandmother learn how to live in a world she had never imagined occupying without him.

There were times when she lost her spark.

Of course she did.

She had lost the person around whom an enormous part of her life had been built.

But she kept finding it again.

I watched that woman pull herself up by her bootstraps over and over and over.

As her mobility began to slip, her determination seemed to dig in like cleats.

She walked laps around her retirement community.

And then more laps.

And then more.

She was determined to keep moving.

Determined to keep participating.

Determined to keep living.

She was not going out without a fight.

And she never did.

There was something hanging in her home during those years that I have never forgotten.

After my grandfather died, photographs of him became almost unbearable for her.

She could not look at his face every day.

It hurt too much.

So instead, she found something else that she could live with.

It was a framed piece of glass with a simple sentence:

Every love story is wonderful, but ours is my favorite.

She could keep that.

And as the years have passed, I have come to understand why that sentence means so much to me.

As a child, I think I believed my grandparents simply had one of those extraordinary love stories that belonged to a very small number of exceptionally fortunate people.

The kind of love you either got lucky enough to find or you didn’t.

But I don’t believe that anymore.

Their love was extraordinary.

But not because they had somehow been handed the only great love story available.

Their love was extraordinary because they made theirs their favorite.

Again and again.

Over decades.

Through raising children and building a life and working and serving and worrying and laughing and disagreeing and changing and aging.

They kept choosing the world they were creating together.

And that requires far more than romance.

It requires teamwork.

Practice.

Repair.

Humor.

Grace.

Forgiveness.

Leadership.

And the repeated decision to participate in the life you are building with another person.

There are vows people take when they get married, but I have come to believe that many of the practices inside those vows belong to all of us.

We do not have to be married to experience great love.

We do not have to be partnered to build a life filled with companionship, devotion, joy, loyalty, or care.

And maybe most importantly, we are allowed to build that kind of love story with ourselves.

That may be the lesson from my grandparents that has taken me the longest to understand.

Because for most of my life, I found it incredibly easy to recognize beauty in other people.

I could see their strength.

Their gifts.

Their courage.

Their goodness.

Their potential.

I could point it out all day long.

But somewhere underneath that was a quiet misunderstanding.

I think part of me believed that if I kept seeing enough beauty in everyone else, loving enough people, giving enough, helping enough, accomplishing enough, perhaps someday I might earn a little of that beauty for myself.

And lately, I have discovered something much simpler.

I never had to earn it.

I can look in the mirror now and recognize that I am a beautiful human being.

That still feels extraordinary to write.

Not because somebody finally convinced me.

Not because people had been flattering me all those years.

Not because someone wanted something from me.

Not because I finally became useful enough, successful enough, generous enough, strong enough, thin enough, accomplished enough, or anything else enough.

It was simply already true.

The same humanity I so readily recognized in everyone else existed in me, too.

And something changed when I finally stopped arguing with the love people were giving me.

When I stopped deflecting it.

When I stopped translating it into obligation.

When I allowed it to saturate me.

The love I was already giving away did not diminish.

It grew.

It became brighter.

Stronger.

More grounded.

More resolute.

Maybe that is another thing my grandparents understood.

Love is not depleted by being shared well.

It compounds.

Their love became children.

Grandchildren.

Great-grandchildren.

Friendships.

Traditions.

Stories.

Standards.

Memories.

A community.

A family.

And now lessons that continue unfolding years after they are both gone.

Tomorrow is their anniversary.

I will miss them.

I will probably cry.

I will laugh, too.

And I will think about that framed piece of glass my grandmother found when photographs were simply too painful.

Every love story is wonderful, but ours is my favorite.

I understand it differently now.

A great love story is not merely something we are lucky enough to encounter.

It is something we learn to receive.

Something we tend.

Something we practice.

Something we participate in.

Something we keep choosing.

And sometimes, if we are very fortunate, the people who teach us how to do that keep teaching us long after they are gone.

Happy anniversary, Grandma and Grandpa.

I am still learning from your favorite love story.