Yellow: The Color of Sunshine and Grief

Prologue

There is a color that belongs to her.

Not because she claimed it loudly or announced it as hers. But because over the years — over the long years of navigating our relationship while she was alive, and then the longer years of carrying it after she was gone — yellow became the quiet language of her presence. The shorthand for everything she was and everything we were to each other. Complicated. Unresolved. And real in a way that time has not diminished.

This is not a piece about resolution. Grief does not resolve — not the complicated kind, not the kind that was never simple to begin with. This is a piece about what happens after. After the anger softens. After the bracing gives way to allowing. After you stop trying to outrun the calendar and learn, slowly and imperfectly, to simply let the day come.

This is a piece about the relationship that does not end at death. About the woman whose face I am growing into whether I chose to or not. About what it means to hold someone with honesty and tenderness at the same time — to love what was good in her, grieve what was not, and recognize that both of those things live in me still.

This is about learning to say her name differently.

This is about yellow.

The Color That Belongs to Her

She drove a yellow Chevrolet Impala. Brand new. Black interior, black vinyl landau top. Her first. Chosen by her, paid for by her, driven off the lot with the particular pride of a woman who had earned something entirely and unapologetically her own. I did not fully understand then what I understand now — that yellow was showing me something about who she was when no one’s expectations were pressing down on her. When she was not someone’s mother or someone’s disappointment or someone’s obligation. When she was simply herself. A woman with taste. With desire. With the capacity for joy that I sometimes forgot she possessed.

I learned early that yellow was the path of least resistance.

When I needed something — a robe for a trip, something of my own choosing — I learned to look for what she would approve of first. We went to Emporium Capwell’s. There was a bright yellow embroidered kimono style robe. I knew that if she liked it, I stood a better chance of getting it. So her color became my color, at least in the moments when I needed her to say yes. Purple, green, orange — those were my colors, the ones that lived quietly inside my own preference. But yellow was the negotiation. The translation. The language I learned to speak so that what I needed might actually reach her.

That is what children of complicated mothers learn to do. They learn to read the room before they enter it. They learn to approach from the angle least likely to provoke. They learn to fold their own preferences small enough to fit inside someone else’s comfort. It is not weakness. It is intelligence born of necessity. It is survival dressed up as preference.

I did not know then that I was learning yellow. I did not know that what began as strategy would become, over decades and through grief and through the slow work of understanding, genuinely and irrevocably mine. That the color I reached for to soften her resistance would one day be the color I reached for to honor her memory. That yellow would outlast the negotiation and become something closer to tenderness.

That is the thing about the relationships that shape us most profoundly. They leave colors behind. Textures. The particular weight of a memory attached to an ordinary thing. And long after the person is gone, you find yourself standing in a garden or passing a shop window or pulling a card from a rack — and something yellow catches your eye. And for a moment, just a moment, she is there.

The Calendar as Teacher

For a long time, May required strategy.

Not enjoyment. Not reflection. Strategy. The kind of quiet, preemptive emotional management that people who have complicated grief learn to practice without being taught — because the alternative is being caught off guard by a date on a calendar, and being caught off guard hurts in ways that are difficult to explain to someone who has not lived it.

Mother’s Day was the most obvious. But it was not alone. Her birthday came with its own weight. Christmas carried a particular quality of ache — the holiday built entirely around the idea of family warmth, of gathering, of the kind of unconditional belonging that had never quite been available to me in the way the season promised it should be. Each of these dates arrived annually, indifferent to whether I was ready, indifferent to how much work I had done in the months between.

So I learned to prepare. To fill the calendar around the difficult dates with enough activity, enough forward motion, enough noise to soften the landing. To busy myself in the days approaching so that the day itself might pass without demanding too much of me. To figure out, in advance, how to forget — or at least how to make forgetting easier.

What I know now — what the years have taught me in their quiet, unhurried way — is that the calendar was never the enemy. The dates were not ambushes. They were invitations. Annually recurring invitations to feel what was true, to sit with what was unresolved, to allow the complexity of the relationship to exist without demanding that I tidy it into something more manageable before the day arrived.

The shift did not announce itself. There was no morning I woke and decided I was done bracing. It was quieter than that. More gradual. More like the way a season changes — not all at once, but in increments so small you only notice them in retrospect. One year, her birthday arrived and I did not spend the week before it outrunning the approach. One Mother’s Day, I woke and the first feeling was not dread but something softer. Something closer to remembrance than resistance.

I began to let the days come.

The calendar did not stop being complicated. But it stopped being something I needed to outmaneuver. Slowly, in the way that only time and honest grief can produce, May became a month I could inhabit rather than endure. Mother’s Day became a day I could meet with a quiet prayer, a yellow flower, a moment of acknowledgment for everything she was — the fullness of it, not just the parts that were easy to love.

The Small Rituals of Remembrance

Grief, when it is no longer acute, becomes a practice.

Not a performance. Not a scheduled visitation of pain at appointed times. But a quiet, ongoing practice of acknowledgment — the small and specific ways we keep someone present without being consumed by their absence. The ways we say I remember you without needing an audience. Without needing it to look a particular way from the outside.

My practice is yellow.

A flower chosen at the market on her birthday because it is the color she would have reached for first. A moment of stillness on Mother’s Day that asks nothing of me except to be honest about what I feel and to let that feeling move through without forcing it in any direction. A quiet prayer that is less petition and more recognition — I see you. I carry you. I am still here, and so, in the ways that matter, are you.

She built community around a table the way some people build cathedrals — with intention, with pride, with the particular gift of making people feel that they had arrived somewhere worth being. Her gumbo was not just food. It was an event. A declaration. A woman saying: gather here, and I will make it worth your while.

I cooked those dishes for her 75th birthday.

I had taken her to a stationery store and let her choose the colors for her own invitation — because I wanted her to have the experience of being chosen. Specifically. Deliberately. Without condition. She chose a bright yellow orange. I found a photograph of her in her youth and created a handmade invitation with a vellum overlay, premium paper, envelopes hand-addressed to every person on a guest list she assembled herself. Her menu. Her flowers. And when I asked her where she wanted to celebrate, she chose my home.

I will never know with certainty if the depth of that offering ever landed for her. Whether she understood what it had cost me — not in money or in labor, though both were considerable — but in love. In the persistent, complicated, still-reaching love of a daughter who kept showing up with her whole heart even when her heart had been handled carelessly.

Two of her three grandchildren were present.  Her son and his wife elected not to attend, having even tried to keep their own children away — protested and stayed. Because they knew. Children often know where the care is real.

And later, after the party and after the fact, her son and daughter in law gave her a ring.   she held it up proudly, marveled and said look what they did for me — and the handmade invitation, the gumbo, the champagne, the hours of labor offered in love, went unremarked.

That moment used to live in me as pure wound. As confirmation of something I had spent a lifetime trying to disprove — that no matter what I offered, it would never be quite enough. That the ledger she kept had a logic I could never crack, regardless of how much I gave or how carefully I gave it. It was my debt. My price to pay for existence. For daring to have a life that did not resemble hers. For having a spirit that irked hers.

But grief, over time, changes the way we hold things. The ring story is still true. The hurt of it is still real. And alongside that truth, I have been able to place another one: that I gave her something she could not fully receive. That the limitation was hers, not mine. That the offering was complete regardless of whether it was acknowledged. That I cooked the gumbo and hand-addressed the envelopes and chose the yellow orange vellum not to win something from her — but because it was who I am.

The small rituals of remembrance I practice now are, in their own way, a continuation of that same impulse. The yellow flower on her birthday is another hand-addressed envelope. Another vellum overlay. Another way of saying: I see you. I choose to honor what was real in you, even now. Even still.

What We Cannot Outrun

There is a particular moment that comes for those of us who have had complicated relationships with our mothers. It arrives quietly, without announcement, and it is this:

You look in the mirror and she looks back.

Not as memory. Not as haunting. But as fact. The ears. The hands. The particular way the face has begun to settle into itself with age. The posture. A gesture made without thinking that you recognize, mid-motion, as hers. The body does not ask your permission before it becomes the archive. It simply does what biology and lineage have always done — it carries forward what was given, regardless of how you feel about the inheritance.

I see her in the mirror now in ways I did not and could not when she was alive. When she was present, I was too busy navigating the relationship to simply observe her. But now, in her absence, I can look. And what I find looking back is not only the wound. I find also the woman who was born in Little Rock, Arkansas into a world that had already decided what she was worth before she drew her first breath. The woman who survived sharecropping and Jim Crow while born into The Depression and loss and abuse and the particular diminishment reserved for Black women in America who dared to want more than the world intended to offer them.

That woman is in my face. In my hands. In the set of my jaw when I have made up my mind about something and nothing is going to move me. In the way I build a table and fill it. In the way I love fiercely and imperfectly and with a stubbornness that will not quite let go even when letting go would be easier.

She is in me. And I have had to make peace with that — not by pretending the harm did not happen, but by learning to hold both. The inheritance is not only wound. It is also survival. It is also will. It is also the particular courage of a woman who was born into impossibility and kept moving anyway — and passed that forward, even when she could not pass forward the tenderness that should have accompanied it.

What I did not understand for most of my life was how completely she had installed herself in me — not only through the relationship, but through the anticipation of her loss.

She had lost her own mother at sixteen. Suddenly. Without preparation. In the middle of girlhood, the most foundational presence in her world was simply gone. And she never recovered from it — not fully, not in the ways that would have made recovery visible. Instead she carried it forward, the way unprocessed grief always travels, and she placed it in me. Early. Before I had the language to understand what was being transferred. She drilled into me her own loss, her own terror, her own motherless grief — as cautionary tale, as emotional inheritance, as the organizing truth of what it meant to love a mother.

I spent my whole life dreading her death. Not because anything was clinically wrong with her. But because she had taught me to. Because she had positioned herself — whether consciously or not — somewhere between martyr and the sacred. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and Mother. A fourth presence in a trinity that was never meant to have a fourth member. Above reproach. Above analysis. Above the ordinary human accountability that every relationship requires if it is going to be honest. Her ways were not to be questioned, challenged, or examined. The devotion was mandatory and the direction was one way — always toward her, never returned in kind.

And I, the daughter, organized myself around the fear of losing her before I had fully reckoned with what it cost me to have her.

That is perhaps the most disorienting thing she gave me — this love laced with preemptive grief. This tenderness that was real and this terror that was installed. I loved her. That is true and it has always been true. I could not imagine my life without her. Also true. And alongside both of those truths, unexamined for far too long, was this: she was the most pain-inflicting person I had ever known. The love and the harm were not separate experiences. They were wound together so tightly, so early, that for years I could not find the seam between them.

When she died on December 11, 2013, the fourth member of the trinity became mortal. The pedestal did not survive her death. And neither did the hope.

Because that is what I had not prepared for — what no one prepares you for. I had spent my whole life dreading the day her breath would leave her body. What I did not know, could not have known, was that the day her breath left her body, the hope left my heart.

The hope of repair. The hope of acknowledgment. The hope that one day, perhaps in some final season of softening, she might see me clearly and choose to say so. That the layers of silent pain and unresolved complexity between us might be named, even briefly, even imperfectly, before the door closed permanently.

The door closed. The hope went with her. And I was left holding both griefs — the one the world recognized, and the one it had no ritual for.

What we try to outrun, we carry. What we try to oppose, we are shaped by — even in the opposition. But here is what I did not anticipate. At some point the opposition softens. Not into agreement. Not into the revision of what was true. But into something more spacious than opposition. Into the capacity to hold her full story — not just her story as it intersected with mine, but her story as it belonged to her.

I do not hold her responsible for what she did not know. I hold her responsible for what she did know and chose not to address. That distinction matters. It is where accountability lives without collapsing into either excuse or condemnation. It is where I can honor the courage of her survival and still refuse to carry the harm of her unhealed wounds as though they were mine to absorb forever.

The relationship did not end when she died. It changed shape. It moved from the terrain of the living — where there was still the possibility, however slim, of repair — into the terrain of memory and integration. Where I am the only one left to do the work of it. Where the conversation is no longer between two people but between me and everything she left behind. In me. On me. Around me. In the yellow that catches my eye at the market. In the mirror, where her ears and her hands and her face look back at me with an expression I am only now learning to meet without turning away.

Life Is for the Living

There is a moment that comes — and you cannot manufacture it or rush it or arrive at it by sheer determination — when you realize that the grief has changed texture.

Not disappeared. Not resolved into something clean and nameable. But changed. The way a scar changes. Still present, still part of the landscape of you, but no longer raw. No longer the first thing you feel when you press against it. Something has grown over it — not to hide it, but to incorporate it. To make it part of the terrain rather than the whole of it.

I know when May is coming now without dread. I feel it in the light, in the quality of the air, in the particular way the world begins to green and open itself again. And I let it come. I do not brace. I simply allow the month to arrive, with everything it carries — Mother’s Day and her birthday and the ordinary Tuesday afternoons when something yellow catches my eye and I think, without planning to: there she is.

There she is.

Not as wound. Not as the argument that never resolved or the acknowledgment that never came or the ring held up to the light while the gumbo sat on the table and the hand-addressed envelopes had long since been opened and set aside. Not as any of the things that once made her name a complicated thing to hold in my mouth.

Just as herself. Present in the way that people who have shaped us are always present — not in flesh, not in the possibility of a different conversation, but in the marrow. In the mirror. In the color yellow chosen freely by a woman who knew exactly what she wanted and was not afraid to want it.

I speak her name differently now.

There is a tenderness in it that was not always available to me. Not because I have rewritten the story or softened the truth of what was hard between us. The truth stands. It is documented. It lives in me as testimony and in my writing as witness. But the truth is not the only thing that lives there. Alongside it, in the space that healing opens when you do the work honestly and without shortcuts, there is also this: the recognition that she was a woman before she was my mother. That she was a girl before she was a woman. That the girl she was had no one to mother her into wholeness, and that the cost of that unmothered childhood was paid forward — as it always is, as it always has been — into the next generation.

I am the next generation. I received the cost. And I have spent my adult life deciding, deliberately and sometimes painfully, what I will pass forward and what stops here. With me. In this body that looks increasingly like hers. In this life that looks nothing like hers — and everything like what hers might have been, had the world been kinder to her at the beginning.

Life Goes On

Not as a dismissal of grief. Not as a command to move on or let go or arrive at some tidier relationship with the past than the past actually warrants. But as the full-throated, hard-won, deeply earned understanding that the most meaningful thing I can do with everything she gave me — the survival and the wound, the yellow Impala and the hollow ache of the ring, the gumbo and the gaslighting, the face I see in the mirror and the courage encoded in my blood before I was born — is to live. Fully. Without apology. Without the permission I waited for and never received.

My life stands on its own. It speaks for itself. And every year, when May arrives with its complicated tenderness and its annual invitation to feel what is true, I meet it as a woman who has done the work. Who chose herself. Who learned, slowly and imperfectly and without a roadmap, to extend to the child she was the protection and the tenderness and the steady, unshakeable voice that says:

You were always worth this. The life you built is yours. And it is beautiful.

And somewhere in that knowing — in the quiet, in the yellow, in the tears released and the prayers offered and the name spoken with tenderness into rooms she will never enter again — I find that I can hold her. Not with resentment. Not with performance. But with the complicated, enduring, hard-won grace of a daughter who finally understands that honoring her own life is not a betrayal of her mother.

It is, perhaps, the most honest tribute she could ever receive.

Closing Blessing

May you find the color that belongs to her —

the small, specific, private language of your remembrance —

and let it be tender rather than sharp.

May you look in the mirror without flinching.

May you see what was given to you — the survival, the will, the courage —

alongside what was cost.

And may you choose, as often as you are able,

to receive the former and release the latter.

May you speak her name differently with each passing year.

Not with less truth — never with less truth —

but with more room around the truth.

May you let the calendar come.

May you let May arrive without armor.

May you let the yellow catch your eye

and know, without needing to explain it to anyone,

exactly what it means and exactly who it honors.

And may you remember —

Life is for the living.

Your life. Fully. Without apology.

Without the permission you waited for and never received.

You were always worth it.

Go live like you know that.