When my sister died, it felt like the sharpest edge of grief. Her laugh still lingers in me, bright and quick, like a chord struck on a piano that refuses to fade. But when my mother passed, silence grew heavier than sound. My mother had been the keeper of so much: her faith, her stories, her cornbread recipe written in fading ink on a yellowed card tucked in the flour jar.

In their absence, I became the matriarch. Not by choice, but by inheritance. I carried recipes, rituals, and the quiet expectation that I would hold everyone together. Grief pressed on my shoulders like a wet cloth and, for a long time, I mistook suffering for devotion. I thought if I loosened my grip on the pain, I would be letting them go, too.

Every morning, I replayed their voices until remembering became a wound that would not close. But one evening, as the sky deepened into indigo and the first star rose, something shifted. A whisper rose within me: You are not meant to carry us like stones. You are meant to carry us like wings.

And I understood. Letting go does not mean forgetting; it means opening. Opening to the ways their love still lives in me. When I laugh in a way that echoes hers, when I stir batter to make cornbread, when I choose to live with the courage they showed me.

The grief is still here, but lighter now. Like a kite released from my fist — not gone, just free. I stand now, not only as the matriarch, but as a bridge between past and future, between sorrow and strength.