There is a green trunk in the corner. My curiosity persuades me to open it, and I have come upon photo albums, diaries and scrap books that appear to have been kept since her childhood. It’s as if my wish to know her better has been answered. Forgetting the task at hand, I sift through the trunk and begin to read about her life. Opening the book her mother kept for her from birth, I can barely make out my great grandmother’s slanted scrawl. “Day of arrival: a beautiful, healthy girl, born on the 21st of May, 1979 at 1:47pm at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Youngstown, Ohio. I was in labor for 18 hours...the baby was posterior until the last 45 minutes or so. Labor was in back, but delivery was easy. Daddy stayed with Mommy through everything. Baby’s birth was a very rewarding, memorable, and positive experience for both Mommy and Daddy. We named her Kelly Kathleen Hissem (Kathleen after her Nana).”

It seems she became very active in the first four months of her life: she started crawling, turning over, reaching for her toys... I can’t read much else. I remember hearing great grandma was 26 when she gave birth to Kelly, and great grandpa was 21. They had met working at a Denny’s, in Boardman, Ohio, married in December, and Kelly was born in May. Two Octobers later, they gave her a baby brother, born Jared Matthew on October 22, 1981.

The first memory she has written in her journals is of the house her family occupied on Walnut Street. It was a green duplex, and Jared was not born yet. They lived upstairs and she remembered the man who lived downstairs, Hank. He was in his 20s and lived with his sister, and Kelly had a crush on him. He had a fish tank and she used to watch the fish swim. She doesn’t remember living there long; soon after she remembers her grandfather dying from cancer. She remembers living in his house after his death, and they had a dog, Queeny, which was her first pet. A short time later, her father sold the house and they moved into a duplex on Riley Street, where Kelly met her first real friend, Jeremy, who would be her best friend for the next eight years.

Before long, she started kindergarten at Lyon Plat Elementary. She loved her teacher and made many new friends. She loved school and did very well. She used to set up her own “class room” in the backyard and round the neighborhood kids together to play teacher; she was always the one in charge. Early on her teachers told her she was a gifted writer; she had a knack for telling stories and entertaining her classmates. Every day she and Jeremy walked the seven blocks to school together, and after their day was done, they walked home together. They seemed to be peas in a pod; wherever there was one, the other was not far away. Since my nana was the only girl in the neighborhood, she learned to play rough, and she established friendships with more males than females, a pattern that continued throughout her life.

Every Sunday, the Hissems went to Kelly’s grandparents’ house for dinner. Sometimes they shook things up and went on Saturdays, too. One particular Saturday night, when Kelly was in first grade, they were getting ready to have dinner (cheeseburgers and French fries). She was in the living room playing when thought she heard her name and started to run to the kitchen. On the way there, she tripped over her Papa’s dog, Patches, who was innocently sleeping in the middle of the floor. She flew across the room and hit her head on the runner of the rocking chair. She doesn’t remember much of what happened other than being rushed to the emergency room for stitches, and the doctor told her he was using blue thread to close her wound. He would show her when he was done, but he never did. She had eight stitches on the right backside of her head. Ever since the stitches were removed, her hair grew in funny in the spot - all tangled and gnarled.

There were no major events in her life again until fourth grade, when she won the school spelling bee and went on to the state championship. She studied new words enthusiastically and with vigor, wanting to hold that trophy. There were articles about her in the local newspapers, highlighting the fact that her mother was a spelling bee alum, as well. Unfortunately, in the second round of competition, the word xenophobia was thrown at Kelly and she stumbled, replacing the first o with an e. It was a loss taken hard, but it didn’t quench her competitive spirit one bit. She competed in the school spelling bee the following year, but she was the runner up to her friend, Jenn. It was okay, though, because Jenn was her best female friend, so losing to her wasn’t a big deal.

At the end of her fifth grade year, her father got a managerial job and had to go to Pasadena, Texas to train. The only position they had available for him was in Birmingham, Alabama, which meant the family would have to move. Kelly was devastated. She had to leave the only life she had ever known and start over in a completely new state. It was May, and there was month to go in the school year, yet her parents would not wait. They whisked her and Jared off to Alabama, where both children finished out the school year successfully. They made friends, and Kelly baby sat for neighborhood kids, what she always considered to be her first job (even though she was only 11 at the time). That was the summer she learned how to swim. The complex they lived in had a pool, and her parents made her take her lessons at the YMCA. The thing she remembered the most about the summer they lived in Alabama was swimming. She went to the pool daily, and in the end, had a great tan when they moved back to Ohio.

Her father was transferred back to Ohio, but instead of Youngstown, they ended up in Toledo, which was three hours (by car) from her birthplace. She started sixth grade a week late at Fassett Middle School, but caught up quickly. Kelly didn’t seem to have a problem with transitions at all. The other students were drawn to her, enchanted by the accent she had picked up during her short residency in the south. Her favorite things to do were walk down by the creek in her back yard, ride her bike with her friends, baby sit for the neighborhood children, and play. She started playing basketball and softball in middle school. She wasn’t very good, but she had fun and met new people. She liked softball the best and played it until high school. By her third year she was playing second base and was the queen of double plays.

The week of Valentine’s Day, when she was in seventh grade, my great grandparents sat her and Jared down to talk to them. Apparently, they had decided they were getting separated, as they couldn’t get along with each other anymore. Kelly cried and didn’t understand. He had moved his family to a place where they knew no one and he was leaving them. He was gone for a few months, and over that time, the bond between her and her mother strengthened, as did the relationship with Jared. Until the day she died, she claimed them as her best friends. Her relationship with her father became strained, and when he moved back in, the two fought constantly.

In order to escape from her unappealing home life, Kelly made friends with some neighborhood girls and spent all her time at their houses. Virginia was a year older, but she failed a grade, and Jennon and Jeni were Kelly’s age. The four were more or less inseparable, and did everything together. They played softball together, somehow managing to get on the same team every season. Virginia was probably Kelly’s best friend in the group, and she lived just around the corner. They dressed alike, talked alike, and did everything together. Everyone thought they were sisters; they were inseparable, and that was the way they liked it.

The other three girls always seemed to have boyfriends, and Kelly bounced from relationship to relationship. She met Tom her freshman year in high school, through one of Virginia’s boyfriends. They dated on and off for about ten months. It was her only serious relationship until after college. He was two years older than she was, and he took her to his junior prom in May. According to her diary, she was very excited and nervous at the same time. She bought a very lovely white dress. The way she described it in her journals, it was white, off the shoulders, and the skirts went almost to her ankles. The top was fitted and then the skirts flared out from her waist. The corsage Tom slipped on her wrist was an array of colorful wildflowers, with a turquoise ribbon that matched his cummerbund. She had a great time, and they took so many pictures, all in which she radiates happiness. A week later, she turned fifteen, and the following weekend she spent Memorial Day at her grandmother’s, back in Youngstown. When she came home, she called Tom and he broke up with her over the phone for another girl. She was crushed; he was her first love, she had dreamed of maybe marrying him.

She had a summer job at an ice cream shop a few blocks from her home. She worked after school during the spring opening and alternated mornings and evenings during the summer. She liked her coworkers, liked the customers, but thought she deserved to paid more, as the employees made what the boss called “seasonal job minimum wage” (half of what was considered regular minimum wage). She worked there for two and a half summers. She got another job as a housekeeper at the Holiday Inn, where she worked over a year.

She wasn’t very active in high school activities until her junior year. She was in Youth to Youth, an anti-drug organization, as well as National Honor Society, drama club, and choir. She got involved in choir her sophomore year, and that was when she met Kristi. Over time, Kelly and the other girls grew apart, but she and Kristi grew closer. They developed a friendship that lasted many years.

There was the newspaper: she had a massive crush on one of the writers and joined to be near him, and then her senior year, she ended up becoming the editor. The paper went to a few competitions and took first in design, and Kelly won a few awards for her articles. Writing was her creative outlet; she filled notebooks and journals with stories and poetry. She graduated with honors in June of 1997, nineteenth out of a class of 265. The following August she moved on to what she hoped would be a better place: she began her freshman year at the University of Dayton as an elementary education major. Her first year wasn’t too horrible; she missed home, but she did pretty well in her classes. She met Laurie and Colleen, the two girls who would be her friends at school. After the second semester, she changed her major to secondary education, concentrating in English and journalism.

The following year was a disaster for Kelly. She went to Dayton to complete her sophomore year, but midway through the first semester she became depressed. She went to counseling, but her grades dropped and she was miserable. Nothing her friends could say or do helped. She was having problems with money, and she made the decision to take the second semester off and work to pay her debts. She found her financial situation to be ironic, since University of Dayton was her choice college only because they gave her more scholarships and money than other colleges. She transferred to Bowling Green, where she finished her teaching degree.

During this time she met Jory James, the singer in a local Toledo band called Squish. She fell for him the first night they met. He was on-stage when she came in and he saw her standing by the door. Between sets he came offstage to talk to her, and every weekend she followed the band from club to club. They had an undeniable chemistry, many common interests, they had fun together, and he was only two years older than she was. The two became very close friends before they started dating. Her parents loved him, especially her father. They liked most of the same music. The couple was together for two and a half years before he asked her to marry him. By that time she had a job teaching English and creative writing in a Toledo public high school, and Squish had gotten their break and had become a successful and popular band. Their self-titled debut album went gold, and the band toured for a year. The separation was hard on Kelly and Jory, but they made it. They got married June 6, 2003 in Toledo. They kept the wedding an intimate affair, with family and close friends. Their honeymoon was spent in Maui, a place Kelly had dreamed of going since she was a child.

Three years went by before Kelly became pregnant with her first daughter, born Tabitha Renee in June of 2006. Kelly was twenty-seven and had been teaching for four years. After so many years of taking care of other people’s children, she was overjoyed to have a child of her own. She was a good mother, and Jory was a wonderful father, though at times he tended to spoil Tabitha. Two years later, in January of 2008, they brought forth a baby boy, Marcus Riley. Jory was excited to have a boy, the “other man of the house,” as he called him. As Marcus grew, the guys in the band all sort of adopted him, and he learned to play the drums, guitar, and keyboard. Tabitha had no interest in instruments; she was blessed with her father’s singing voice. From the time she was able to talk, she only wanted to sing.

After Squish released their second album, Reborn, in 2012, the James family moved into a larger house, but they stayed in Toledo because that’s where they had roots, and family was important to both Kelly and Jory. The band went on tour again, and the children missed their father terribly, regardless of the nightly phone calls and post cards from every state he went to. Tabitha was in first grade, and Marcus was in preschool at the time. They were a close knit family, and when one member was gone, the rest got thrown off track. The kids had yet to realize that having a famous musician for a father wasn’t a common thing in Toledo; it was a normal part of their lives.

As the years went by, the children grew and made friends and became involved in school activities. Since Kelly taught during the days, Jory became a “room parent,” and chaperoned field trips and class parties. Their friends often joked about them being the Cleaver family; things seemed so perfect. As with everything, their lives were not perfect. Kelly worried when Jory toured, afraid he might be tempted by another woman, and that he would give in to that temptation. It all went back to her dad’s affair. She swore to herself that she wouldn’t let the same thing happen to her. They had a very open and honest relationship with each other, and of course, they had their share of fights, but they always made up in the end.

With the money from Jory’s band, there was no need for Kelly to work, but she didn’t want to quit teaching. She loved what she was doing; it was the only thing she had ever wanted to do with her life, and she was good at it. She had two sophomore English classes, a creative writing class, and a two-period journalism class. Every year, her creative writing students put together an anthology from pieces they had written for the class. She enjoyed watching their faces light up when they saw their writing in print, in a book.

The children were soon in high school, and Kelly often found herself wondering where time was going. Over the years she had remained close to her mother, and she and her father had resolved their issues. Her brother had married his high school sweet heart, and they had kids of their own. Kelly had lost touch with some of her old friends, but her closest friends had, conveniently enough, ended up with the other members of the band. Laurie had married Greg, the bass player, and Kristi and the drummer, Brad, had been living together for a few years. The three couples and their kids, despite different lifestyles, were devoted friends. Kelly kept in touch with her college roommate, Colleen, and sometimes she and Jory would visit Colleen and her husband Ryan.

Things were finally running smoothly in her life: she was happy and in love, she had great kids and friends, she had her health, and for the first time, she was financially stable. It came as a shock when her father was diagnosed with lung cancer. He had smoked for years, so cancer was expected, but it wasn’t welcome. It was a fast process, but her mother couldn’t overcome the loss. The family tried everything they could to console her, but her pain was too great. She stopped eating, she never left her home, and she wouldn’t answer the phone. Months after her husband’s death, Kelly’s mother became so sick and worn that she collapsed. She had given up. The double loss was devastating to Kelly and Jory, whose own parents had died when he was a teenager. She had always said she didn’t know what she would do if she lost her mother, and now she was being forced to find out.

Time went on, and gradually she hurt less. She was able to live her own life, because she knew that was how her mother would want it. She continued teaching long after Squish quit making albums, and eventually the children became adults and went to college. Tabitha went to Bowling Green and majored in music therapy and Marcus left for Ohio State, where he majored in accounting. During the summers, Jory and Kelly vacationed in North Carolina, where they had a house near the ocean. For their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, they traveled across Europe, visiting Paris and London and Madrid to name a few. They had made smart investments with their money, so they were never worried about money. Both were healthy and happy, and they were more in love now than ever.

One evening, the couple came home from a day of Christmas shopping and dinner, and Jory went outside to check the mail. It was dark out, and the roads were wet from falling snow. Suddenly Kelly heard the screeching of tires and a cry of anguish. Her heart stopped and her feet were rooted to the floor. She knew without looking what had happened. She ran out of the house, forgetting her jacket, her eyes filled with tears. Jory’s body was a crumpled heap on the side of the rode, and the driver that had hit him, was kneeling beside him, crying and apologizing. He had hit a patch of ice and hit Jory as he was crossing the street to bring the mail in. Catalogues and Christmas cards blew around them as she held him in her arms.

With the love and support of friends and family, she continued on. Not a day went by that some little thing did not remind her of Jory. The phone would ring and she would think to herself that he was calling to say he’d be home in a little bit, that traffic was bad or the music lesson he was giving had run late. Then she would remember he would never be calling again. By now she was in her seventies and still going. Despite the efforts of friends, she wasn’t interested in meeting another man. She had loved Jory, and no one could take his place in her heart.

By now, her children had children, and she had retired from teaching. She had few regrets. Kelly and Jory had done everything they had dreamed and more. Every now and then she would remember fights they had had, like the time Tabitha wanted to get her eyebrow pierced and Kelly had refused to allow it. Jory had reminded her how she had gotten the tattoo of a frog sitting on a crescent moon on her shoulder against the wishes of her parents. She had been so angry at him for undermining her authority in front of their daughter. Eventually she had given in, knowing full well Tabitha could be doing worse things than getting pierced.

She was so proud of her children and their accomplishments. They were the joy in her life. Every Sunday she would drive to either our home or Marcus’s, where we all would gather for dinner. Two Sundays ago, my nana never made it to dinner. She was on her way when her car collided with another. Apparently, the other driver had swerved to miss a squirrel, hitting her instead. She died on impact. It was irony, I think, that the other driver was trying to save the life of a squirrel but ended the life of another human.

She had been a fighter, not letting herself be overcome with grief when life got tough. I think she would want to be remembered as a caring teacher and a loving wife and mother, as well as be respected for her persistence and devotion. I feel my eyes fill with tears as I put down the green felt journal with my grandmother’s final entry. “I have seen a new century. I have taught the children of students I had twenty years ago. I have seen my children grow, and their children have become adults. I have lost people I had loved more than life itself. I know my time is coming soon, and Jory and I will be together for eternity. I feel him with me daily, and for that I am grateful. His love made me strong, and he freed me. Life is what you make of it, and I made mine count for all it was worth.”