Devoted to the Aftermath is my personal exploration in learning to grieve. It started with my mother who died when I was twelve, my grandmother dying when I was twenty and my daughter when I was twenty-two. This story is my journey through the difficulties in overcoming poverty, physical and emotional violence, abuse, and neglect while trying to process these impactful losses. It’s a combination of rebellion from my father’s religion in the Jehovah’s Witness Organization, a search for meaning after death, and an understanding of ancestral history and spirituality.

March 25th, 2024

I’m mourning not only the people, the relationships, but the idea of what those relationships could have been. Spending more than half my life without a mother means I don’t know how mothers and daughter’s function. Would she be supportive of my choices, unsupportive, mean, kind, my friend or foe? Nine months of carrying and no days being a mother means I don’t know how I would have functioned as a mother, or her as my daughter. When I’ve lost people early in a relationship I mourn them, yes, but even more, I mourn the missed memories, missed hugs, verbal disagreements. I wonder how different my life would be now. What would you look like? How would you sound? Would we like each other or not interact at all? It's the mystery and the unknowns that drive me crazy in my dreams. Push me to stay asleep.

Seeking information, connectedness, meaning, ancestors are tied, interwoven into the story like they live inside my hands. Maybe their importance is my present day. I’m mourning that which I can’t see, feel, the warmth, the tangible, the verbal. The bridge between this world and theirs connects the dilemmas I’ve faced. Brings them to the surface as normal life altering situations. I never had a chance to bond with my ancestors but that doesn’t demean the connection, the reality that they are family, the importance their lives brought to my own. Being a motherless daughter and a daughterless mother doesn’t mean I am not forever bonded to them, that their memories don’t live on in me, that they and I, we are one. Maybe the missed opportunities don’t matter as much as embracing allegiance to family, to kinship, to faith.