Grandpa Walter built a small manufacturing company from nothing, starting in a rented garage the year my father was born, growing it slowly over four decades into a business that supplied custom metal fixtures to construction firms across three states. Grandma worked beside him for most of those years,
doing the books at the kitchen table long before they could afford an actual accountant, answering phones, learning to read a balance sheet the hard way, the way you learn anything when the alternative is losing everything you’ve built.
Grandpa died six years before that terrible morning at the airport, a stroke that took him fast, in his sleep, which I’ve always told myself was its own small mercy even though I know grief doesn’t really work in mercies. My father took over running the company almost immediately afterward, and for years,
everyone in the family simply assumed, the way you assume the sun will rise, that the company and the building it operated out of belonged to him outright, inherited the ordinary way a son inherits his father’s life’s work.
