My grandfather’s name is in a book.
Not a history textbook. Not an encyclopedia. A book that names him, specifically, by name, as a rebel. A freedom fighter. A man who refused.
I didn’t know this until I stood in Hungary this month, in the country he fled, holding that knowledge in my hands. And something shifted in me that I don’t have a word for yet.
Last month, I took my mother back to Hungary for the first time since she left in 1956.
She was less than a year old when my grandparents packed up their four children, all under thirteen…and walked. Seven miles. Through the night. Toward a border, toward a risk, toward something they could not yet see but could not stop reaching for.
My grandfather knew what would happen if he stayed. His name was in that book. He had been too vocal, too visible, too unwilling to bow. Under communist rule, that wasn’t a reputation, it was a death sentence.
So they left.
They left their home, their family, their language, their land. They left everything that told them who they were. They walked into the dark with four children and the clothes on their backs and the radical, stubborn belief that freedom was worth more than safety.
This month, my cousin drove us in his jeep along that same seven-mile route. The same ground. And my mother, who is seventy years old and had not been back since she left as a baby, sat in that jeep and cried.
She had mixed feelings about making this trip.
For years, she carried a quiet question she couldn’t quite put down: Was what they did brave or was it negligent? Was taking four children across a border in the middle of the night the act of courageous parents or reckless ones?
I understand why she asked it. Grief does that. It makes you turn things over, look for somewhere to put the weight of what was lost.
But I watched my mother in Hungary, and here is what I saw:
She met cousins she had shared a crib with and never known. She sat with her godmother, now elderly, who told her stories about what she was like as a baby. She was surrounded by family, a whole branch of her life that had existed without her, that had wondered about her, that had kept a place for her even across seventy years and an ocean.
And I watched her face when she understood: I had a life here. And I had a life there. And my parents gave me the chance to choose.
That is not negligence. That is the most ferocious kind of love.
My grandparents wanted freedom.
Not freedom in the abstract. Real freedom. The freedom to believe what they believed. To raise their children without a government deciding what those children were allowed to think. To live in a way that matched what was true inside them, not what was demanded of them from the outside.
They looked at the life in front of them, and they looked at the life they wanted, and they made a decision that most of us will never be asked to make.
They didn’t talk about it. They didn’t wait for the conditions to be perfect. They didn’t make a plan for the plan. They walked.
That is what independence actually looks like. Not a concept. An action.
With the Fourth of July just having past, I’ve been sitting with what it means, not just as a holiday, but as a question.
What are you still waiting for permission to do?
What life are you standing at the edge of, circling, telling yourself you’ll cross when the timing is better?
We don’t face the choices my grandparents faced. The stakes for most of us are not life and death. But the pattern is the same: we see something we want, a change, a truth, a version of ourselves that feels more real — and instead of walking toward it, we wait. We analyze. We wonder if we’re being brave or reckless. We stay.
And the years pass.
On this trip, I started thinking about independence differently.
Not just what we gain when we claim it. But what we have to sort through to get there.
My grandparents didn’t just walk away from Hungary. They walked away from an entire story about who they were and what was possible for them. And that is, I think, what real freedom requires of us, not just the courage to move toward something new, but the willingness to make a decision about what we’re carrying forward and what we’re leaving behind.
So I’ve been asking myself three questions. I offer them to you too:
What do you keep? The things worth carrying forward, the values, the courage, the love that shaped you. For me, it’s my grandparents’ willingness to act. Their refusal to let fear be the loudest voice. I want my kids to inherit that.
What do you donate? The things that were true for someone else’s chapter but not yours. The rules you inherited that don’t actually belong to you. The stories about what you’re capable of that someone handed you years ago and you’ve been carrying ever since.
What do you throw away? The old narratives. The calcified beliefs about yourself, about others, about what’s possible. The ones that were never really true or the ones that were true once and aren’t anymore.
This is not a one-time act. This is the ongoing work of becoming free.
My grandfather’s name is in a book because he refused to disappear.
He didn’t know, when he made the choice to leave, that his grandchildren would one day stand in the country he fled and understand, really understand, what it cost him. He didn’t know his legacy would be this: a family that believes, in its bones, that freedom is worth walking toward.
This month, I am thinking about him.
I am thinking about what it means to not just celebrate independence, but to actually live it. To stop waiting for better conditions. To ask yourself honestly what story you’re still living inside that doesn’t belong to you anymore. To pick up the parts of your legacy worth keeping and walk.
My grandparents walked seven miles into an uncertain dark.
What is your seven miles?
This is exactly the kind of question we sit with inside SheFirst and The Coach Approach to Leadership, not just what do you want, but what is standing between you and it? Not just where are you going, but what do you need to put down to get there? Because real leadership, of a company, a team, a life, starts with this: the willingness to look honestly at what you’re carrying, and choose.
Much love,
Gretchen
