‘I don’t know who I would be’
This story is one of a series written in connection with our 2024 Signature Report, A season of hope: Growing the role of families, which focuses on the importance of kin for children in foster care.
Keeton Byerly vividly remembers his grandfather teaching him to drive a stick shift at 16. The teen repeatedly forgot to release the emergency brake in the black 2002 Hyundai Elantra that his Grandpa Lowell bought him. Stickers soon appeared in the car that read, “Take the brake off!” They were reminders not only of what to do in the car but of a grandfather’s dedication to the grandson he was raising.
Byerly, now 30 and a part-time employee with Ohio nonprofit Kinnect’s Youth Navigator Network — a resource for young people who are in or have experienced foster care — shares the story as he looks through family photos that include his grandfather, who took him in as a toddler. Byerly’s mother struggled with substance abuse, and his father was absent, so he moved in with his grandfather in Springfield, Ohio, where they lived until his grandfather died when Byerly was 17. After his grandather’s death, Byerly lived with his step-grandmother into his early college years.
“He was the person I saw when I woke up, the last person I saw at night,” says Byerly, now recently married, working at a Target distribution center and hoping to start his own family in Columbus. “He cooked me breakfast, got on me about my grades. He was my everything.”
Along with family photos, Byerly holds close a special valentine gift from his grandfather – a brown stuffed bear with a red bow, given with some chocolates after a childhood scrape. Goldie now rides in the back of Byerly’s white Toyota Camry, a link to his grandfather’s love of driving and their road trips to the Florida beach.
“If it wasn’t for my grandfather, I would have been in the system. I would have been put up for adoption,” he says. “If my grandfather wasn’t there for me, I don’t know who I would be.”