Dear Mama

I am the oldest of four children born to Jamila Atiya Lyn Lewis (neé Fields), who was herself just 15 when she gave birth to me. Before I ever knew the sound of her laugh or the shape of her hands, she almost died bringing me here. I spent the first three days of my life separated from my original Earth, and maybe that is part of why I have spent so much of my adulthood trying to understand what it means to return to the people who made me possible.

Over the course of my life, my mother proved herself to be loving, fallible, generous, complicated, funny, stubborn, and full of a kind of survival I still cannot fully name. More than anything, she possessed a fierce willingness to be herself and to choose herself again and again, even after life tried to convince her she was unworthy of rest or reinvention. That is the inheritance I pray I carry forward; just the courage to keep becoming.

The last time I was able to sit with her, laugh with her, share space with her where she recognizably still had life in her body, was Mother’s Day in 2022. A week later, she was in the hospital. Two years after her 50th birthday, she died from metastatic stage 4 breast cancer that had spread across multiple organs. There are losses that rearrange your schedule, and then there are losses that rearrange your understanding of the world entirely. I have lost people before, but nothing compares to losing a mother who loved you well while also growing and healing alongside you in real time.

This day never gets easier. Grief does not suddenly become noble because time has passed. Today, I feel her especially deeply as I grieve the death of something else too, as I sit inside another ending I did not ask for. Still, I want to honor the woman who sacrificed so much so that I could be here at all. The woman whose life continues to echo through mine.

May her memory keep living through me, Jah, Munch, DJ, and through her four grandchildren, who deserve to know they come from a woman who fought hard to remain herself in a world that asked her not to.