When remembering the life of the beloved and fierce American matriarch Barbara Bush, you’re also faced with a 73-year marriage that graced us with two presidencies. Described as the rock of the Bush family, Mrs. Bush was one of only two first ladies in American history to have a presidential son. (She’s in good company; the other was Abigail Adams). Barbara and George Bush’s love is a relic of a simpler time that seems, in the age of dating apps and Instagram, more and more out of reach. They met when they were just sixteen years old, at a Christmas dance. Three years later, on January 5, 1946, they married. After George served in the war and graduated from Yale, the WASPy north-easterners settled in Texas, where George caught the oil bug and, eventually, the political one. Mrs. Bush was a strong role model for her impressive family, and the nation. Don’t let the tweed suits and pearls fool you: like any Texan woman—native or otherwise—who makes a mark, she was powerful and unpretentious. According to The New York Times, her characteristic humor did not fade in her final days. As George W. said, she was a “woman unlike any other who brought levity, love, and literacy to millions.”