Sitting With It

My grandmother just died.

The last time I saw her, I was three years old.

I have no conscious memory of her, only a fact of her existence, a name attached to a face I can’t clearly recall.

I was adopted, left Congo for Belgium, and never saw her again.

And now, I never will.

The emotions are complex. I wouldn’t call it grief, exactly. It’s not mourning the person I knew, because I didn’t really know her.

But it is a loss.

A loss of possibility.

Of the reconnection that will never be.

Of the faint, fragile hope that my children might one day meet her, that thread between generations, now forever severed.

I find myself thinking a lot.

About identity.

About how disorienting it can feel to be adopted, to be lovingly taken in, yes, but also uprooted. Or maybe the word is unrooted.

How do you build yourself when you don’t really know where you come from?

Of course, I know. I can tell you the place, the country, the language. But do I really know?

It’s somewhere deep inside me, I suppose.

Those early years, lived and felt but now beyond my reach.

They shaped me. I lived them.

But I can’t remember them.

I can’t connect to them.

And that makes me sad.

Sad for the child I was, who lost so much before she had the words to name it.

Sad for the cultural legacy I can’t pass on to my children.

Sad for the stories I’ll never hear, the smells I’ll never recall, the language I never learned to speak.

I have no clear answers.

But I’m choosing, today, to sit with all of it.

To feel what I’m supposed to feel,

whatever that is.

And to honor my grandmother

not with memories I don’t have,

but with presence.

With this moment.

With this truth.