04/25/2026
There are women who move through the world like weather,undeniable, elemental, shaping the topography of everything they touch without ever deigning to ask permission to exist. Mommow was that kind of woman. Today, I do not merely remember her. I call her present.
I do not come in mourning. I come in veneration.
She was a woman of architectural integrity. Her elegance was a private liturgy, practiced because she understood that how one presents oneself is the primary form of self-respect. A suit pressed to a razor’s edge; a posture that announced “I have arrived” long before she ever spoke. She dressed for the life she intended, never for the life circumstance attempted to hand her.
And then, she would descend into the dirt.
She would kneel in her garden and tend her roses with the same fierce devotion she gave to everything she loved,patient, attentive, and entirely unafraid of the thorns. She knew you cannot love from a sterile distance and call it love.
In her kitchen, she was the high priestess of the hearth. What she practiced was a devotional alchemy,food as love made edible. She knew I stole the cookie dough; she would vacate the room at precisely the right moment to allow for my small crimes. She gave me the gift of "getting away with it," which is, in truth, the sacred gift of feeling safe enough to be imperfect in someone else’s sanctuary.
I hold the complexities of her story with a steady hand. I know she desired a love she never quite received, yet she kept giving anyway. That is not naivety; it is a radical act of faith in the worthiness of love itself.
There is a distance between where we ended and where we began, but distance is not the final word. The whole story is cookie dough and roses, and a woman of immaculate elegance who got down in the leaves with me anyway. The whole story is that she called me Shu Shu,and I have never stopped being her.
Mommow,I carry you into every room. Into every standard I refuse to lower. Today, I do not grieve you quietly. I invoke you.
Be the scent of roses and that knowing laugh. Be the woman who knew exactly what she was doing when she left the room. I see you. I always saw you.
love and miss you.
