The Grace in Distance

When I was nineteen and pregnant with my son, my mother died in the emergency room of Bridgeport Hospital while I sat directly across the street at my OB-GYN appointment, completely unaware. We had spoken just days before, our first real conversation since she’d been released from prison to my care, and our last. I had told her she needed to act like a mother. She had told me, in the way only she could, that I was the child and she was the mother, and I needed to stay in a child’s place. Then she hung up on me.

When it came time to plan her funeral, my aunts and uncles stepped in and took care of everything. I was so young, so overwhelmed, so new to this family I was still trying to understand. My uncle paid for most of it. A few of my aunts contributed. And then there was my Aunt Anita, my mother’s oldest sister, my grandfather’s firstborn daughter, a woman I had never met. She sent money to help with the service. But she made it clear, she would not attend, and she did not want to be listed in the obituary.

I didn’t know how to take it. Part of me was confused, how do you not come to your own sister’s funeral? How do you ask to be erased from the program like you were never part of the story? But there was another part of me, even at nineteen, even in my grief, that understood. My mother’s life had been hard and complicated and full of choices that hurt everyone who loved her. She had been in and out of prison most of my life. She had been on drugs. She was the only one of her siblings who lost her children to the system. And my Aunt Anita had built a whole different life, she was a community leader, a big name in Bridgeport, someone who had distanced herself from our family very early on and only came around maybe at funerals, maybe not even then.

So I understood. Or at least, I thought I did.

My grandfather had eight children by eight different women, and the story goes that most of those women were friends. Don’t ask me how that happened. My grandfather was a lot of things, smooth talker, talented, a musician who had a way with women that opened doors and hearts. Some might call him a womanizer. He didn’t marry any of those eight women. Most of the children were what you might call step-siblings, they all knew about each other growing up, but there wasn’t a whole lot of closeness between them because of course there were issues with their mothers. My grandfather, while not necessarily being the most present father, had some kind of relationship with each of his kids. All of them knew him. Except my Aunt Anita was different.

I don’t want to call her the black sheep, because when I think of that term, I don’t mean it negatively. But my aunt just chose something else. She chose her own path, her own peace, her own name. And she did it decades before “no contact” became a trending topic on social media.

Me and My Auntie Anita

A few years after my mother’s funeral, Aunt Anita reached out to me. I honestly don’t even remember how it happened, but one day she contacted me and invited me to lunch. She took me on a tour of Bridgeport as she knew it, through her eyes. And from that moment on, we clicked. She took the opportunity to share with me the history, how she felt in the family, why she had made the choices she made. And I got it. I totally understood it.

Now, at the age I am now, having very little contact myself with the maternal side of my biological family, I understand it even more. There is a lot of toxicity on that side of my family. A lot of generational cycles that people just don’t choose to deal with. A lot of pain that gets passed down like heirlooms nobody wants but everybody inherits anyway. I love my family because of course they are my family. But I’ve also felt like the black sheep myself, because I’ve chosen a different path of life. And it doesn’t mean I’m any better than they are. It just means our choices are different.

My mom wasn’t close to her family either. And there are so many of them, I often questioned why no one took me and my brother when my mom was going through all that she was going through and we were placed into care. Why didn’t someone step up? Why didn’t someone choose us? But then I have to look at myself now and ask, if someone would have taken us, where would I be? What would my life look like now? And I realize that sometimes the answer to why no one saved you is because God was saving you in a different way.

Not through them, but from them. Not by keeping you in, but by leading you out.

I’m super grateful that although I don’t understand all of what has happened, God has always done what was best for me. Even when it didn’t look like it. Even when it hurt.

With the passing of my Aunt Anita recently, I felt sad in a way that surprised me. She is one of the few connections I have left with my biological family on my mom’s side, and it really hurt to know she’s gone. We had monthly conversations. She would text me and tell me to send pictures of my grandkids, and she was so in love with them. She always told me how proud of me she was. I just wish we would have had more time. I wish I would have had the opportunity to get to know her on an even deeper level, because our lives, our missions, the things we hold important, they’re so similar.

I’m grateful though that she left a daughter here, my older cousin Raynelle, who is absolutely amazing. I’ve had the opportunity to begin building a relationship with her over the years, and I’m happy that there is someone who can carry on her legacy. Because legacy isn’t just about proximity. It’s not about who stayed close or who showed up to every family gathering. Sometimes legacy is about teaching someone else that it’s okay to choose peace over presence. That it’s okay to love people from a distance. That breaking generational cycles requires the courage to do what looks, to everyone else, like running away.

My cousin Raynelle and I

Grief is so weird. Life is just weird. The dynamics of my family, and as I’ve been trying to navigate those different dynamics, it’s been hard to say the least. But I’m forever going to miss my Aunt Anita.

And I want to say something to anyone reading this who feels like the black sheep. To anyone who has gone low contact or no contact with family members and carries guilt about it. To anyone scrolling social media and seeing all those posts about people cutting off their families and feeling that tug in your chest because you’ve done it too, or you’re thinking about it, or you can’t understand how anyone could do that, let me tell you what my Aunt Anita taught me.

Sometimes love looks like distance.

Sometimes the healthiest boundary you can set is space. Sometimes you can honor where you came from without ever going back to it. My aunt loved her siblings. She contributed to my mother’s funeral. But she didn’t come. She didn’t let herself be listed. She had built a life that required her to protect what she had created, and that meant keeping some things and some people at arm’s length. That wasn’t cruelty. That was wisdom.

You can grieve people you had to leave. You can love people whose choices devastated you. You can be grateful for the family you came from and also grateful that you’re not still in it. Those things can coexist. They’re not contradictions, they’re just the complicated truth of what it means to survive a family that couldn’t be what you needed.

There’s no shame in choosing yourself. There’s no shame in protecting your peace. There’s no shame in recognizing that sometimes the people who hurt you didn’t mean to, and sometimes they did, but either way, you’re allowed to walk away. You’re allowed to build something different. You’re allowed to break the cycles that broke the people before you.

My last photo with Auntie Anita

My mother couldn’t break free. My Aunt Anita did. And now I’m trying to, in my own way. Not because I don’t love them. Not because I think I’m better. But because I’ve learned that you can’t pour from an empty cup, you can’t heal in the same environment that made you sick, and you can’t become who you’re meant to be if you’re constantly trying to fix who they refused to become.

To the black sheep reading this, you’re not lost. You’re just walking a different path. And sometimes the family members who understand you best are the ones who also had to leave to survive. Sometimes the greatest gift someone can give you is permission to do what they did, choose life, choose healing, choose yourself.

My Aunt Anita gave me that. And now I’m passing it on to you.

Rest in peace, Auntie. Thank you for showing me that distance doesn’t mean you don’t care. Thank you for being proud of me. Thank you for loving my babies. Thank you for choosing yourself so that I could learn to choose myself too.

You weren’t the black sheep. You were just brave enough to be free.