Inside the family life of Lindsey Graham, the senator who helped raise his little sister

Lindsey Graham was one of the rare U.S. senators who never married and had no children. But the South Carolina Republican, who died Saturday at 71 after a brief and sudden illness, did not consider himself a man without a family.

"I've never married. I guess I attribute that to timing, too," Graham wrote in his 2015 memoir. "The opportunity never presented itself at the right time, or I never found time to meet the right girl, or the right girl was smart enough not to have time for me. I haven't been lucky that way. But I have a family."

That family was, above all, his younger sister, Darline Graham Nordone.

A childhood behind a bar

Graham grew up in Central, S.C., a small mill town outside Clemson, where his parents, Millie and Florence James "F.J." Graham, ran a bar, restaurant, pool hall and liquor store called the Sanitary Cafe. The family's home was one room behind the bar, and a young Graham bathed in water warmed on the stove, according to Politico. They later moved into a trailer, per NPR.

By age 12, he was racking tables in the poolroom downstairs to help the family get by. He would later call life at the bar "a great way to grow up," even if, he joked in his memoir, parents today "would probably lose custody of their children" for letting them behave "as independently and as rascally as I did."

No one in Graham's family had gone to college before he enrolled at the University of South Carolina, where he joined the Air Force ROTC.

Losing both parents, 15 months apart

While Graham was still a student, his mother was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, not long after the family took its first flight together on a vacation to Disney World, according to Politico. She died at 52. She was buried the day before Darline turned 12, the Post and Courier reported.

Fifteen months later, it was 13-year-old Darline who discovered their father after a massive heart attack, when she tried to wake him for school.

"I can remember the day my father passed away, standing in the living room of that house, absolutely scared to death," Darline told NPR in 2015. "Lindsey wrapped his arms around me and promised me he would always be there for me and always take care of me."

Graham, then in his early 20s, kept the promise. He returned home from Columbia nearly every weekend to look after his sister, who lived with relatives in nearby Seneca, keeping tabs on her curfew and her friends, his law school roommate told NPR. When he joined the Air Force as a military lawyer, he became Darline's legal guardian, and, according to the Post and Courier, later adopted her, so his benefits would flow to her if anything happened to him.

"I have always looked up to Lindsey," Nordone said in a 2014 campaign ad, per the Post and Courier. "He's just always been there for me as long as I can remember. If I fell down and scraped my knee, Lindsey was the one I ran to."

'A rotating first lady'

Graham came close to marriage once, he revealed in his memoir. While stationed in Europe with the Air Force in the 1980s, he considered proposing to a Lufthansa flight attendant he was dating. He never did.

His bachelorhood became a running punchline during his short-lived 2016 presidential campaign, and Graham was usually the one telling the joke. Asked who would serve as first lady in a Graham White House, he said he would have a "rotating first lady," suggesting his sister and friends "could play that role if necessary," according to ABC News.

When Graham launched that campaign in June 2015, he did it from a stage on Main Street in Central, steps from the old bar. The day before, Darline walked into the poolroom for the first time in roughly three decades and cried, the Post and Courier reported. On the way to the announcement, brother and sister stopped at their parents' graves.

"Some of you have known me since my family lived in the back of the bar in that building," Graham told the crowd that day. "But I'm pretty sure no one here, including me, ever expected to hear me say: I'm Lindsey Graham, and I'm running for president of the United States of America."

Nordone had not spoken publicly about her brother's death as of Sunday afternoon. A statement from Graham's office said the senator's family "appreciates prayers at this time and asks for privacy during this incredibly difficult period."