There was one chair at Liz Johnston and Brice Bolden’s wedding that nobody sat in. It was not a seating-chart mistake. Liz and Brice had put it there on purpose — for Mary Alice Maddox Johnston, the grandmother everyone called Nana, who died in October 2025, only weeks before the November 8 ceremony. She had hoped to be there. On November 8, 2026 — five days ago — Liz and Brice marked their first wedding anniversary, and that empty chair still explains this family.
The Chair Nobody Sat In
Nana had been fading for months. “For the past six months, Nana has been in hospice care,” Trent Johnston said in the Season 17 trailer. “We are concerned she is not going to be able to attend the wedding.” She did not make it. Liz and Brice went ahead with the day she had been looking forward to, and they saved her a seat: an empty chair at the venue, left in tribute to the grandmother who had hoped to watch her granddaughter marry. The reception carried the same idea further, with a display of couples’ photographs labeled “Love Stories Before Ours.”
A Field, Eighty Guests, and a Flower Girl Who Had Just Turned Two
The ceremony took place in a field at the Johnston family home in Forsyth, Georgia — the place Liz described to PEOPLE as “togetherness at the place where it all started,” and “where we spent most of our dating life.” Around eighty guests came for a romantic fall theme. Their daughter Leighton, who had turned two just five days earlier, walked down the aisle as flower girl. Liz wore a Casablanca Bridal gown — “[Their] facial expressions when they saw me said it all,” she said of her mother and sisters seeing it for the first time. Her uncle Jon Mills officiated and led a unity candle lighting. They danced their first dance to Teddy Swims’ cover of “You’re Still the One” and left through a tunnel of sparklers. And in a detail that matters more now than it did then, Anna attended despite the rift with her family.
One Year Later: The Honeymoon That Was Supposed to Wait
Liz had said the honeymoon would wait until the couple’s one-year anniversary, so they could stay close to Leighton. That anniversary arrived five days ago, on November 8, 2026 — and the family that celebrated it looks nothing like the one that stood in that field. Leighton turned three on November 3. Coleman arrived on September 8, and Liz has said the family is complete. Nana never met him: she died before the second pregnancy was even announced, in March 2026. The wedding made Liz and Brice “officially a family of three,” as Liz put it — and within a year, the family of three became a family of four.
Why the Chair Still Matters on Premiere Night
Season 18 premieres Tuesday, November 17, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on TLC, and it follows Liz’s second pregnancy on screen — the scheduled C-section under general anesthesia, the fear she voices on camera, Brice admitting he is not sure what to do if something goes wrong. The audience already knows how it ends: Coleman is home and healthy. Season 18 carries a second empty chair now — Anna’s — and the two chairs could not be more different. Nana’s chair was a choice, a way of keeping someone present. Anna’s is a silence nobody has filled. A year ago, Liz and Brice proved this family knows how to honor an absence. On Tuesday night, the question is whether they know how to end one.
So when the premiere opens on Liz’s second pregnancy and the delivery she called herself a wreck over, here is the question for the group: which chair will you be thinking about — the one Nana never got to sit in, or the one Anna left empty?
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