What Grows After the Storm

A Life Measured in More Than Years

There are some lives that can be measured in birthdays. Seventy years. Seventy trips around the sun, seventy years of mornings and evenings, ordinary Tuesdays and extraordinary moments, birthdays celebrated and birthdays remembered. Seventy years of growing older. But there are other lives that cannot be measured quite so simply. Some lives are measured in what they have survived, in the people they have loved, the people they have buried, the prayers they have whispered, the hands they have held, and the number of times they have stood back up when life gave them every reason to stay on the ground. My nana, Barbara Clovis, is one of those people.

Today, September 3, 2026, she turns seventy years old. And when I think about seventy years of her life, I don’t think first about the number. I think about everything that happened in between. I think about a little girl growing up in South Dakota as one of eleven children, about a young woman who would eventually leave everything familiar behind for an Oklahoma man, about a wife and mother who built a family of her own, and about a woman who would experience some of life’s deepest losses and somehow continue to become softer, kinder, and stronger through them.

A Girl Who Learned About Loss Too Young

Barbara was born on September 3, 1956, in South Dakota, the daughter of Beryl Clark and Flight Officer Robert Clark. She grew up surrounded by siblings and family, in the kind of home where there were always people around and where childhood was shared with ten brothers and sisters. But when Barbara was only ten years old, her childhood was changed forever. In 1966, her father passed away.

There are some losses that happen before a child has the language to understand them. You may not know how to explain death, but you understand the empty place it leaves behind. You understand that someone who was there yesterday will not be there tomorrow. You learn, much too early, that life can change in the blink of an eye. For Barbara, losing her father became one of the earliest wounds in a life that would eventually carry many of them.

That experience would not become the thing that defined her. Perhaps that is one of the first places her strength began; not because losing her father suddenly made her strong, and certainly not because the pain disappeared, but because she learned early that grief could be carried. She learned that a person could wake up the morning after something terrible and still take another step.

From South Dakota to Oklahoma

Years later, Barbara’s life took one of those turns that seems almost too ordinary to recognize as the beginning of an entirely new story. She met a man named Steve Gates, a young man from Ralston, Oklahoma, who was working custom harvest in South Dakota. Somewhere between the fields of South Dakota and the Oklahoma horizon, the two of them fell in love. Before long, Barbara left South Dakota and moved to Oklahoma, where she married Steve and began building a life in a place that would eventually become home.

Together, Barbara and Steve built a family. They had four children: Clark, Joni, Cathy, and William. The family they created would continue growing until it became twelve grandchildren—Lainy, Madelyn, Gunnar, Gavin, Camille, Ella, Steven, Lyza, Aspen, Coy, Willow, and Paislee. What began with two people became generations of people who carry pieces of them forward.

There is something beautiful about a family tree when you look at it long enough. You begin to realize that the people who came before us never really disappear. They remain in our mannerisms, our stories, our traditions, our memories, and in the lives that would never have existed without them. Barbara’s life became intertwined with all of these people, and motherhood and grandmotherhood became some of the greatest chapters of her story.

Experiencing Loss

Motherhood would also bring Barbara some of the deepest pain a person can experience. In 2004, she lost her oldest son, Clark, in a tragic car accident. There are losses for which there is no adequate language, and there is perhaps no greater example than a mother having to bury her child. There is no way to make sense of a world in which the person you once held in your arms is suddenly someone you can only hold in your memories.

Clark was her firstborn. He was the beginning of the family she and Steve had built, and losing him meant losing not only a son but a piece of the life she had imagined for him. The future she had pictured for her oldest child suddenly disappeared. Yet even in that grief, Barbara continued.

That does not mean she forgot him. It does not mean the pain went away. It means she learned something that grief teaches us whether we are ready for the lesson or not: love does not disappear simply because someone does. Clark’s life remained woven into the family he helped create. His name remained spoken. His memory remained alive. And Barbara carried him forward, as mothers so often do, in the only way they can.

Six years later, my nana would face another devastating loss. In 2010, after a battle with a brain tumor, she lost her husband, Steve. The man she had met in South Dakota, the man she had followed to Oklahoma, the man with whom she had raised four children and built decades of memories, was gone.

Losing a spouse is losing a part of the life you thought you would grow old inside of. It means learning how to navigate ordinary things that suddenly feel unfamiliar. It means seeing an empty place where someone used to sit. It means remembering that there was once a time when you could simply reach across the room and find them there. And yet, once again, Barbara kept going.

She continued being a mother. She continued being a grandmother. She continued being a sister, a friend, and a woman of faith. Eventually, life gave her another person to walk beside, and she married Rick Clovis. To me, there is something incredibly brave about allowing yourself to love again after you have already experienced the kind of loss that can convince a person never to open their heart again. Nana did not allow grief to close the door permanently. She chose to keep living.

A Year of the Unthinkable

Then came 2016, another year that would leave its mark on Barbara’s heart. She lost her mother, Beryl, the woman who had known her before she became a wife, a mother, or a grandmother. Her mother had known her as a little girl, had watched her grow, and had been part of the earliest chapters of her life. Losing her meant saying goodbye to one of the last people who remembered Barbara before the world knew her as Nana.

That same year, Barbara experienced another loss no grandparent should ever have to endure. Her granddaughter, Aspen Gates, at the age of two, passed away after a short battle with leukemia. There are some kinds of grief that seem impossible to describe because they are too large for language. Losing a grandchild means grieving not only the child but the years that should have followed. The birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, the ordinary afternoons that should have filled a lifetime.

And yet, even after losing her mother and her granddaughter, Barbara remained.

That word is simple, but I think it may be one of the most important words in her story. She remained. She continued to love. She continued to pray. She continued to care for the people around her. She continued to wake up and move forward even when moving forward must have sometimes felt like the hardest thing in the world.

Loss and Growth

I have started to believe that loss and growth are not opposites. We often talk about grief as though it is simply something we must get through, as though one day we are supposed to reach the other side and leave it behind. But maybe grief does not work that way. Maybe we do not leave loss behind. Maybe we learn how to grow around it.

That is what I see when I look at Barbara’s life. She lost her father as a child, and somewhere along the way she became a woman capable of carrying enormous amounts of responsibility and pain. She lost her oldest son, and although that loss never became less important, her family continued to grow around his memory. She lost her husband, and she found the courage to keep living and eventually love again. She lost her mother, and she became one of the people responsible for carrying her family’s history forward. She lost her granddaughter Aspen, and she carried another permanent piece of love inside her.

The growth never erased the loss. That is important. Aspen’s life did not become less valuable because it was short. Clark’s life did not become less meaningful because it ended too soon. Steve’s life did not become less important because Barbara eventually learned how to live without him. Grief does not cancel love. If anything, grief is evidence of how deeply we loved in the first place.

And somehow, through every season, Barbara grew. Sometimes that growth was spiritual. Sometimes it was emotional. Sometimes it was simply the quiet growth that happens when a person survives another difficult day. Sometimes it was learning that faith does not mean you will never hurt. It means that you do not have to walk through the hurt alone.

A Faith That Has Been Tested

My nana is one of the strongest Christian women I have ever known. And I do not mean strong because she has never suffered or because she has never had difficult days. I mean strong because her faith has been tested by some of the hardest circumstances life can offer, and she has continued to choose God anyway.

There is a difference between a faith that has never been tested and a faith that has walked through grief and still believes. Barbara’s is the second kind. She does not simply talk about Christianity. She lives it. She studies her Bible. She prays. She practices what she believes. She is a member of Ralston First Baptist Church, and her faith is not something she pulls out only when life becomes difficult. It is woven into the ordinary parts of her life.

She is kind. She speaks with soft words. She puts other people before herself. She notices people. She cares. She serves without needing recognition for it. She has a gentleness about her that is difficult to explain unless you have experienced it yourself. And perhaps that is one of the most remarkable things about her: life could have made her hard, but it didn’t.

She has every reason to understand how cruel life can be, yet she continues to treat people with kindness. She knows what it feels like to lose people, yet she continues to love people deeply. She has experienced enough grief to become bitter, but instead she became compassionate. She has faced enough uncertainty to become fearful, but instead she became faithful.

Her strength does not roar. It does not demand attention. It speaks softly. It kneels in prayer. It opens the Bible again the next morning. It forgives. It serves. It keeps believing.

Maybe that is what real strength looks like.

The Garden She Built

If you look at my nana’s life from far enough away, it could be easy to see only the losses. Her father. Her son. Her husband. Her mother. Her granddaughter. But if you look closer, you begin to see something else growing around every empty space.

You see four children. You see twelve grandchildren. You see a family that continues to gather and grow. You see the people who carry her stories and the people who have learned from watching her. You see generations of her life walking around in the world.

That is what makes a family tree so beautiful. The branches do not erase the broken limbs. They grow around them. They reach toward the light anyway.

Barbara has done that her entire life. She has grown around the places that hurt. She has allowed the difficult things to shape her without allowing them to destroy her. She has taken the pieces life handed her and somehow continued building something beautiful with them.

Seventy Years

Seventy years is a long time. It is long enough to watch children become adults and adults become parents. It is long enough to become a grandmother twelve times over. It is long enough to see people come into your life and eventually leave it. It is long enough to understand that life can change in a moment and that the people we love are never promised to us forever.

But seventy years is also long enough to learn something that perhaps Barbara could not have known when she was twenty: life is not defined only by what happens to us. It is defined by what we do with what happens to us.

And my nana has done something beautiful with hers.

She has loved. She has forgiven. She has served. She has prayed. She has endured. She has grown. She has remained soft in a world that could have made her hard. She has continued to put other people before herself, even when she has had every reason to focus only on her own pain.

I do not think her greatest legacy will be found in a photograph or a birthday number. It will be found in the people she raised, the grandchildren she loved, the people she prayed for, the people she helped, and the people who watched her walk through grief and wondered how she kept standing. It will be found in every person who learns that kindness does not have to be loud, that faith is something you practice rather than simply claim, that love can survive death, and that grief and joy can somehow exist in the same heart.

What She Leaves Behind

Perhaps that is what I hope I remember most about my nana. Not simply the things she has lost, but what she has continued to grow.

She has grown a family. She has grown a faith. She has grown a life.

She has grown kindness in places where bitterness could have taken root. She has grown compassion in places where anger could have flourished. She has grown hope in places where grief could have taken everything.

Her life is proof that loss and growth can exist in the same place. Something can die and something else can still bloom. A broken heart can still love. An empty chair can still hold a memory. A grave can mark an ending without becoming the end of a story.

Maybe that is what faith has taught her all these years: that God can grow something beautiful from soil that has known suffering.

And perhaps that is what makes her story so beautiful to the people who love her. We do not love Barbara because she has had an easy life. We love her because she has had a hard one and somehow remained kind. We love her because she knows what grief feels like and still knows how to laugh. We love her because she has buried people she never wanted to bury and still believes there is something worth living for. We love her because she has been hurt by life and still chooses to love life anyway.

Today, on September 3rd, we celebrate seventy years of Barbara. But we are not only celebrating the years she has lived. We are celebrating the woman she became through them: the Christian who continued choosing God.

If I could give my nana anything on her seventieth birthday, I think I would give her a mirror; not so she could see the seventy-year-old woman looking back at her, but so she could see everything that grew behind her. Every child. Every grandchild. Every prayer. Every person she loved. Every person she helped. Every storm she survived. Every piece of herself she thought she had lost but somehow found again.

Because that is the beautiful contradiction of my Nana’s life: she has lost so much, and yet somehow she has become so full. Full of faith. Full of love. Full of family. Full of grace. Full of stories. Full of God.

Maybe that is what it really means to grow. Not to become untouched by the storms, but to become the kind of woman who can stand in the rain and still believe something will bloom when it is over.

Happy 70th birthday, Nana.

You have taught me that strength does not always roar. Sometimes it speaks softly. Sometimes it kneels. Sometimes it forgives. Sometimes it keeps going. And sometimes, after everything has been taken away, it simply looks toward heaven and says, “I still trust You.”

And Nana, after seventy years, I think that may be the most beautiful thing you have ever grown.