During one of those quiet visits in March of 2014, she asked me to close the door. Zara had gone to the cafeteria with a nurse, and it was just the two of us.
She looked at me and said, “Joan, I need you to listen carefully. I have spoken with my attorney. Everything is in order. When I’m gone, you will receive what is yours. Do not let anyone take it from you. Do you understand?”
I held her hand and told her I did not want to talk about her being gone.
She squeezed my fingers and said, “I’m not asking you to talk about it. I’m asking you to hear me. Promise me you will not let anyone take what is yours.”
I promised.
I did not know the full extent of what she meant, but I promised.
Grandma Lorraine passed away on April 12, 2014.
She was 82 years old.
She died in her sleep at the hospital, peacefully, which is what the doctors told me. And I chose to believe them because I needed to.
I was 26 years old, in my last semester of law school, and the one person who had never stopped believing in me, the one person who had held the thread of my life together when everything else was unraveling, was gone.
The funeral was held at a small church in Shepherdsville. I sat in the front row with Zara, who was 10 years old and trying so hard to be brave.
My father showed up. So did my mother. So did DJ and Tanya.
It was the first time I had seen any of them in over a decade.
My father looked older. His hair was gray and he had gained weight. My mother looked the same, just harder around the edges. DJ was 30 by then, married, working at the same agricultural supply company as my father. Tanya was 23, still living at home, still being taken care of.
They sat on the other side of the church.
My father glanced at me once during the service.
My mother did not look at me at all.
After the burial, my father walked past me and said, “She was a good woman.”
That was it.
No apology. No acknowledgment of what he had done to me. No recognition of the granddaughter standing beside me, the child he had never met.
Just five words, and then he walked away.
I graduated from the Brandeis School of Law in May of 2014, one month after burying my grandmother.
I graduated in the top ten percent of my class. I had been selected for the dean’s law review. I had completed internships at the Jefferson County Public Defender’s Office and the Legal Aid Society.
And when I walked across that stage, for the second time in my life, I felt the absence of my grandmother like a physical wound.
The purple hat was not in the audience.
The voice shouting that’s my granddaughter was not there.
But I could feel her.
I swear I could feel her.
After graduation, I took the bar exam in July of 2014.
I passed on my first attempt.
In September of that year, I accepted a position as an assistant public defender in Jefferson County. The pay was modest, around $42,000 a year, but it was more money than I had ever made in my life.
And the work was exactly what I had dreamed of doing.
I was standing in courtrooms, fighting for people who had been overlooked, marginalized, and forgotten by the system. People who reminded me of the 16-year-old girl who had stood on a cold sidewalk with a duffel bag.
Around this time, something else happened.
I received a letter from an attorney named Harold Beckman in Shepherdsville. He was Grandma Lorraine’s estate attorney.
The letter informed me that my grandmother had established a trust in my name. The trust contained the proceeds from the sale of her farmhouse, her life insurance policy, and her savings.
The total value of the trust was approximately $1.6 million.
I read that letter three times.
I sat at my kitchen table and read it three times because I could not believe what I was seeing.
$1.6 million.
My grandmother, the retired schoolteacher who drove a used sedan and bought clothes from secondhand stores, had accumulated $1.6 million over the course of her lifetime through careful saving, smart investments, and the sale of her property, and she had left every cent of it to me.
The trust had specific terms. It was structured so that I could not access the full amount until I turned 30, which would be in 2017. Until then, I could draw a small annual stipend for living expenses and for Zara’s education.
The trust was administered by Harold Beckman, who had been my grandmother’s personal attorney for over 20 years.
He told me Lorraine had been very specific in her instructions.
The trust was to go to Joan Wills and no one else. Not to Dale. Not to Connie. Not to DJ. Not to Tanya.
Joan Wills. Period.
I cried for an hour after that meeting.
I cried because of the enormity of the gift. I cried because of the love behind it. And I cried because Grandma Lorraine had been telling me for years that she would take care of me, and I had not fully understood what she meant until now.
In the years that followed, I kept the existence of the trust quiet. I did not tell my parents. I did not tell DJ or Tanya. I did not post about it on social media. I did not change my lifestyle.
I continued working as a public defender, continued living modestly, continued raising Zara with the same values Grandma Lorraine had instilled in me: hard work, humility, and the belief that your worth is not determined by the people who leave you, but by the person you choose to become.
The years between 2014 and 2020 were the years when I built the life I have today.
They were not glamorous years. There were no dramatic turning points or cinematic moments.
They were years of steady, relentless, unglamorous work.
And that is exactly what made them transformative.
After three years as an assistant public defender, I moved into a role at the Legal Aid Society of Louisville, where I focused on family law cases. I represented mothers fighting for custody. I represented grandparents trying to gain guardianship of grandchildren who had been neglected. I represented teenagers who had been placed in the foster system and needed someone to advocate for their rights.
Every case felt personal to me.
Every client reminded me of a version of myself or a version of Grandma Lorraine or a version of Zara.
I poured myself into that work in a way my supervisors noticed.
In 2017, the year I turned 30, two significant things happened.
The first was that I gained full access to the trust Grandma Lorraine had established.
Harold Beckman sat down with me in his office and walked me through the details. After years of conservative investment growth, the trust had grown to approximately $1.82 million.
I sat across from him and stared at the number on the document, and it still felt surreal.
I made careful decisions with the money.
I paid off my student loans, which totaled about $87,000. I put $200,000 into a college fund for Zara. I bought a modest three-bedroom house in the Highlands neighborhood of Louisville for $285,000, the first home I had ever owned.
I invested the rest with a financial adviser who came highly recommended by Harold Beckman.
I did not buy a luxury car. I did not take extravagant vacations. I did not change who I was.
Grandma Lorraine had not saved that money her entire life so that I could blow it on things that did not matter.
She had saved it so that I could build something.
And that is what I did.
The second significant thing that happened in 2017 was that I applied for a position as a family court commissioner in Jefferson County. It was a quasi-judicial role, a stepping stone toward becoming a full judge.
The selection process was rigorous. I had to submit an extensive application, provide references from attorneys and judges who had worked with me, and sit through multiple interviews with the judicial nominating commission.
I was nervous in a way I had not been nervous since law school, but I prepared thoroughly.
And in November of 2017, I was appointed as a family court commissioner.
That was the moment I knew Grandma Lorraine had been right.
She had told me I would sit on a bench one day. She had said it with such certainty, such unwavering conviction, that it had sounded almost like a prayer.
And now here I was, sitting on a bench, hearing cases, making decisions that affected the lives of families and children.