A blessedness, maybe.
In October of last year, I watched my grandmother caress the cheek and whisper into the ear of her older sister, knowingly for the last time. In that liminal space, between this world and another, there were no words—only the weight of years, over 84 circles of sisterhood, of kinship, of shared life.
As the visit ended, the time, all of it nearing, she stretched her palm across my great Aunt Marlene’s frail body, its faint rise and fall at the command of a shallow breath in rhythm with the whispered prayer.
Interlocking arms as we took down the hallway, I was quiet, curious about her heart.
I asked her a question, insufficient in its inquiry: “How do you feel?”
I was struck by her response.
“Blessed,” she said.
In that moment, even in all my years tucked in between mahogany velvet-lined pews, peering over their wooden ledges — I was fumbling with the answer, trying to pull it into the light. How? In the face and anticipation of such grief, had she peace, resolve with both the leaving and what remained?
I turned the word over in my hands.
Blessed.
—searching for its edges.
It was too neat, too smooth, like a stone polished down by years of her proclamation. I wanted to pry it open, to split it in two, to see what was hiding in the marrow.
I could only selfishly consider myself after the encounter, thinking of the frequency of which loss came knocking at my door, dragging its heavy coattails across the threshold, cloaking itself over my body, desperately trying to make it a home.
I spent the fall into the winter there —wailing into the echoes of things I knew would not return. A wandered lover, a broken promise in my womb and all the other tiny griefs that grew on me in a year's time.
I took to my studio in the cold mornings, through the dark nights—sitting with the years and what they make of you, what you give to them. It all clung to me. The grief, the rupture. It shaped itself into the fabric of my work, leaving me to contend with the jagged, the broken, the unfinished. No matter where I cut or how I bent the materials in front of me, I could not let go.
One morning, a loop of YouTube interviews murmured in the background, landing on a conversation between Toni Morrison and Bill Moyer. She spoke of Pilate from her novel Song of Solomon and similar women in her family who moved through the world with a certainty that unnerved others. Women who carried an intimate knowing of God, of death, of the unseen.
“They had a language for it,” she said. “I don’t know. A blessedness, maybe.”
A blessedness, maybe.
I recalled our walk down that corridor and considered what it meant to call oneself blessed in the face of loss—not as dismissal, but as recognition. To see what remains. To face what loss has made. Blessed in the sacredness of survival, of being a witness to lives that came before her, to actively and lovingly shape those that followed. The blessing of the unyielding presence of her sisters—her origin, her core, her practice.
This practice for her both quiet and consistent, understood blessedness as acquisition. As no soft thing. It was forged through rupture, through blood, through sacrifice, through the jagged, relentless reassembly of what has been torn apart.
I considered my practice next to hers —one held together by shards, by loss and absence, by what has been broken and remade. I was engaged in work that urged me to live in the fragments, to make space for transformation in the places one would rather leave empty. In the quiet of my studio, I understood her declaration —not as an erasure of grief, but as an acknowledgment of the way it had carved her into someone who could hold both the ache and the bliss.
When I began my artistic journey, five of my grandmother’s seven sisters—who are the origin, the nucleus of my work—were living. Their presence and steadfastness were the quiet scaffolding of a new language. Today, she is the last. The last living daughter of my great-grandparents.
These losses, both in passing and in anticipation, are an inheritance.
Not just a lineage of grief, but of form—how it all meets, folds, and reconfigures. Absence rearranges the center, makes the edges more pronounced, turns what was once given into something that must be gathered, preserved, reassembled.
And yet—blessed.
Blessed in the holding, in the carrying, in the making of space for what was and what remains. Blessed in the practice itself—the cutting and layering, the breaking and binding, the slow, deliberate act of remembrance.
These women, who birthed this work and this curiosity, will always hum at the edges of my life, of this practice, and of the inheritance that is blessedness. Because to inherit is to bear witness. To name. To gather the echoes and the stories, to piece them together with steady hands. To turn toward what grief has made of me and call it blessed.
