08/05/2026
Last week, my Mimi returned to stardust at the age of 91🪽✨
I have been moving slowly with that sentence. Letting it settle into my body. Letting grief arrive in waves, in memories, in quiet moments where the world keeps going and something inside me is still standing at the riverbank.
I found myself returning to my roots along the banks of the Ohio River in New Amsterdam, honoring her life, our lineage, and the women who came before me. The ones who carried stories, recipes, prayers, tenderness, grit, and the kind of love that does not disappear when a body leaves.
Grief has a way of pulling us backward and inward at the same time. Back to the places that shaped us. Back to the names, hands, kitchens, porches, rivers, and family lines that made us. Back to the truth that we are not separate from those who loved us into being.
I am learning again that loss is not only an ending. It is also a doorway into remembrance.
Mimi is in the river now.
In the soil.
In the stars.
In my bones.
In the way I return to myself.
May we honor the ones who came before us by living with more softness, more courage, and more reverence for the ordinary sacred things they left behind.
With love,
Chasta
