Grandparents Day always catches me somewhere in the middle of a full life, and every year it stops me anyway. I want to tell you about mine, because the lessons they left me are still showing up in how I lead and how I hope you’ll lead too.
I had two very different sets of grandparents, both of whom I called Pop and Nana, and I didn’t grow up thinking of them as teachers. Looking back, I can see how much they shaped the woman standing in front of you today. Pop and Nana Greer lived in Illinois. He was a doctor and she was a nurse. Pop Greer started the very first hospital in the little town where I was born, after coming home from serving in World War I. He also donated land to the city of Vandalia to help build their high school. I haven’t written much about him before, but he was quite a guy.
A man who comes home from war and decides his next mission is building a hospital and a high school for a town that had neither is telling you something important about purpose.
Then there’s Pop and Nana Baue, my grandparents on the funeral home side, and watching the two of them was like watching someone live two full lives at once.
Nana Baue was known around our funeral home as the white-glove lady, and she earned that name. She did not come downstairs without her hair done, her makeup on, her dress just right. I remember once she broke her hip and was lying in a hospital bed, and before she would let the doctor examine her, she made me go home and bring back her hairbrush and her lipstick. Presentation mattered to her because how you showed up was part of how you honored the person in front of you, whether that was a doctor or a grieving family.
And then you’d drive out to the farm and find that same immaculate woman gathering eggs and stuffing sausages with her hands covered in meat during butchering season. Pop Baue was right there with her, teaching me to hunt, and then I’d bring what we’d caught inside so Nana could teach me how to cook it. It was hard, unglamorous work the two of them did without a second thought.
Here’s what stays with me. They never treated those two worlds as a contradiction. The woman who wouldn’t see a doctor without her lipstick on was unbothered getting blood on her hands. The man who drove a Cadillac and stood beside families in their darkest hour was just as at home in the woods with a rifle.
They held refinement and realness at the same time, and made it look effortless.
Pop Baue pointed that same instinct at the community too. He brought the Salvation Army to our county because he saw people with nothing and no one helping them, and he and Nana ran food and clothing drives, giving straight from the farm to those who needed it more than they did.
They used everything they had built to take care of others, quietly and without ever needing credit.
I think about that a lot as I coach women stepping into ownership and leadership. So many of you feel like you have to pick a lane. Be polished or be real. Be composed or roll up your sleeves. I’m here to tell you, from two generations of proof, that you don’t have to choose. The best leaders I’ve known could sit across from a grieving family with total grace and then go do whatever needed doing, however messy.
You don’t have to choose. That range is the whole job.
So this Grandparents Day, think about your own. What did they teach you without ever meaning to teach you anything? Whatever it is, carry it forward. That’s how their legacy keeps working, long after they’re gone.
Cheering you on, always!
Lisa
