Named for the one you called.

LeeLee was my grandmother. Not by blood, and not at first.

Her name was Leanna Grey. She came into my mother's family's life in 1950s Brooklyn — hired, at first, for one day a week of housework. My mother was a little girl then, with a mother who mostly couldn't be there and a father working every hour to keep them housed. Leanna saw what that house actually needed, and quietly became it: every day after school, dinner on the table, someone home when a child opened the door. She was, in every way that matters, raising her.

When my mother was sixteen, her father died. Leanna became the parent she had left. Nobody hired her to do that.

Her own children were grown and living in the South. The years of care she gave my mother's family were years she could have kept for her own, and we have never taken that lightly.

When I was born, she moved in with us for months to help raise me. We visited her in Virginia nearly every year of my childhood. She was the only grandparent I ever knew. My mother went to her first with every problem, her whole life — and was beside her as she aged, and when she died. Today, my own son carries her name.

LeeLee loved you no matter what — without conditions, without keeping score. She was the person you called when everything felt too big. Someone to talk to. Someone you could trust to get things done. Everyone should have someone like that.

Nothing we build could be her. But it's built in her honor, and it carries her name so we remember what care actually looks like.

— Alex