Greetings my lovely dark, feral, and bright ones,

This morning marks exactly fourteen days since my mother passed away. This past weekend, we held an online remembrance for her. It was a quiet, sparse affair. There were people there—Ronnie, myself, my two cousins, Gail, Tania, Mama Rose (Stephanie’s mom), and that woman, the homesteader. But it wasn’t the people I half expected to show up. Not even her own cousins or family members breathed a word. None of her friends came. Not one.

I made the event public. I specifically invited the people who had been making noise online, posting about how much they were going to miss her. People she actually thought cared for her throughout her life. And they never even dared to show up.

I am angry for her. It makes me sick to my stomach. It was an online event—there were no excuses. There were no plane tickets to buy, no travel plans to coordinate, or anything of that sort. All they had to do was click a link, show up, and share a memory of her. But when the door was wide open, the people who claimed to love her vanished. They wanted the credit for mourning her without doing a single second of the actual work.

What struck me as incredibly sad wasn’t just the absence of those who should have been there, but the lack of great memories from those who did show up. My childhood best friend’s mom—Mama Rose—was there, and as we talked, I realized she didn’t remember a single fucking thing about my mother. That made me so incredibly sad. What made me sad about all of this is that no friends of her from her Facebook, Tennessee, or childhood friends even bothered to take five minutes out of their day.

I went ahead and memorialized her Facebook account, thinking maybe that would be the place where people would finally step up. I thought that’s where the tributes would come pouring in. But guess what? Not one single goddamn tribute has been posted on that page. Not one. The only things sitting there are the comments from myself and my best friend Kimmy. They didn’t even post online—they just commented, and the ones she truly thought were her friends didn’t even bother commenting or doing a single thing. That’s the grand total of her digital legacy from the people she thought loved her. It is absolute bullshit.

The more I thought about it today, the more the curtain pulled back on my own upbringing. I realized there were hardly ever get-togethers with friends or parties growing up. The house was quiet, isolated. My mother kept the world at a distance, and because of that, I grew up without a blueprint for community. Now, as an adult, I barely have friends—especially here in Tucson. Isolation can be an accidental inheritance if you aren’t careful.

That other woman who actually showed up—a self-proclaimed “friend” and complete stranger to me—didn’t come to share a memory at all; she came to ask how she could get into my mom’s storage unit. She proudly told me she was a homesteader who makes her living by going through dead people’s belongings to flip them at yard sales for a profit.

Fourteen days ago, a younger version of me might have felt a wave of obligation to protect that stuff. Today? I don’t want any of it. I could care less what happens to it. Some might think that sounds callous or horrible, but it’s just accumulated stuff. My mom’s life—and her passing—became an immediate, undeniable proof of a simple truth: you should enjoy what you have while you are alive, because you cannot take a single piece of it with you. If it’s been rotting in a storage unit for years, it’s just clutter. Let the dump trucks have it.

Even as I sit here typing this, that homesteader keeps buzzing my phone, texting me repeatedly to ask if I’ve “made a decision” yet. The entitlement is breathtaking. But the decision is an absolute NO. I didn’t even waste my breath replying. I just hit the block button. I am not handing over my mother’s life to a vulture, and I am sure as hell not handing over my peace.

For the last two weeks, my mind has been locked in full-blown survival mode—get this done, file that paperwork, manage the logistics. It has only been fourteen fucking days! I have been running on pure adrenaline, leaving myself zero time to actually stop, breathe, or process a single emotion.

Until this morning.

I woke up and went through my normal, mundane routine. I showered, made the bed, got dressed, and grabbed my first cup of mushroom coffee. I went into the bathroom to dry my hair and put on my moisturizer. And as I sat there, staring at my own green eyes in the mirror, the dam finally broke. I took a deep, clean breath, looked at my reflection, and said out loud:

“No more living up to your expectations of me. No more holding my breath when I want to say things, post things, or do things because I’m terrified it will upset you. I am free to be myself, finally.”

For the first time in fifty-five years, I realized I don’t have to walk on eggshells anymore.

The Illusion of the “Good Years”

When a parent passes, society hands you a beautifully wrapped box of toxic positivity and tells you to only remember the good. For a long time, I bought into that script. I tried so damn hard to keep things positive, singing her praises and making her look like a saint to the outside world. And now, I have people who knew her back in Tennessee reaching out to tell me what a “sweet lady” she was.

WHAT THE FUCK????

It makes you feel like you’re losing your goddamn mind. But here is the brutal truth: they didn’t know her. They knew the performance. It is easy to be a saint to people you only see on your best behavior, but the people behind closed doors pay the actual price. The world didn’t see the hidden tax I was paying to maintain that illusion. They didn’t see the suffocating anxiety when the phone rang, the holding of my breath, or the times I had to literally lay the device down and walk away, allowing my mother to dominate the entire conversation just to keep her calm. They didn’t see the times I wanted to punch a wall because her behavior was so rude and out of control. They didn’t have the nightmares. They didn’t carry the agonizing guilt of feeling frustrated, as if I had no right to be aggravated by a lifetime of toxic behavior.

Whenever I wanted to post my true thoughts or share my life, I had to block her from seeing it. I walked on broken glass barefoot every single day just to keep the peace.

True balance isn’t wiping away the tears and pretending the storm didn’t happen, nor is it forgetting the sunshine. It is having the courage to hold both—the beautiful, the bad, and the ugly—and knowing that the love was real even when it was pure hell. I am done protecting the fairytale.

Refusing to Inherit the Archive

Instead of asking me how I am moving through this complex grief, the world looks at me and coldly says to just get over it and move on. They look me in the eye and repeat the same hollow line: “She is in a better place and no longer suffering.”

How the fuck do they know this? Have they died and come back? I don’t think so.

They say it to comfort themselves because they are too terrified to look at the raw, heavy reality of what actually happened. They didn’t pay the invisible tax of keeping her calm, they didn’t live through the pure hell, and they don’t get to use cheap platitudes to rewrite my history from the safety of the sidelines. What they don’t realize is that I didn’t start grieving fourteen days ago; I have been mourning the mother I deserved but never had for my entire life.

Today, I was forced to look at the digital footprint she left behind. I discovered an obsessive, multi-year archive on her phone—folders upon folders of hundreds of screenshots capturing every conflict, every Facebook argument, every political fight, and every text message validation she ever had since 2009. She had even screenshotted a deeply vulnerable letter I sent her years ago begging for a kinder, gentler relationship, replying to it with a passive-aggressive guilt trip and filing my pain away as ammunition.

She spent nearly two decades building a digital prison of her own bitterness, guarding her grievances like trophies.

When I saw that, I realized exactly why I have to stop looking at those messages. I don’t want to be like her, and I refuse to hold onto that stuff. Keeping those files isn’t an act of honor; it’s choosing to inherit her disease. Hitting delete on those toxic text threads isn’t dismissing her memory—it is a fierce act of sovereignty. It is settling the account, clearing the slate, and refusing to carry her bricks into my future.

The Sanctuary of Her Voice

But as I cleared out the digital noise, I found a different kind of archive—one that I built myself, hidden away in my saved voicemails. Sitting with those audio files tonight, the real weight of what I carried, and what we shared, became deeply clear.

In one message, she calls me to walk through a “little problem” with her insurance benefits and her transportation spending allowance. You can hear the exact dynamic I lived with; she tells me that if one more person mentions an Uber to her, she is going to slap someone. She wanted me to pick up the phone, straighten it out, and fix it, because she believed they would listen to me. That was my life—managing her bills, her care, and her logistics with immaculate integrity right up to her final breath. I was her problem-solver.

Yet, listening to the rest of the messages, the pure noise of our conflicts falls away. I hear her laughing, absolutely psyched because a household allowance finally approved a new micro-convection rotisserie oven, joking that she doesn’t even know what she wants to cook first. I hear long stretches of music playing softly in the background of her silence before she jumps in to complain about politics. I hear her calling on New Year’s Eve, wishing me a happy end to the year and wishing for a better future.

Most of all, I hear how every single call ended:

“I love you, and I’ll talk to you later. Bye-bye.”

“Your mama loves you. Bye-bye.”

She didn’t write down her grievances to weaponize them against me; she just left short, rhythmic footprints of her presence in my day. I chose to hit delete on her fortress of bitterness, but I am keeping her voice. She archived the pain; I am choosing to archive the love.

Breaking the Generational Wheel

Some might look at my raw honesty and ask why I bothered to hold a memorial service for her at all. The answer is simple: I refused to let her suffer the same generational disrespect that her own mother suffered.

When my grandmother—her mother—passed away in 2012, history was incredibly cruel. No one mourned her except for me and maybe one or two others. There was no memorial service. All of her things were simply thrown in the trash because nobody wanted a single piece of her life.

My mother watched that happen. She lived through that cold abandonment, and she spent the next fourteen years locked in a sick, dizzying loop. For over a decade, I had to listen to my mom constantly bash Gram, spitting out old grievances, only to flip the script the next day and praise her to the heavens. It was heart-wrenching to watch. She was trapped in the whiplash of her own unresolved trauma, frantically building an obsessive archive of text messages just to gather “proof” that she existed, that she mattered, and that she couldn’t be erased the way her mother was.

Today, I caught myself sliding right into that exact same cycle. I found myself swinging between the rage of the trauma and the desperate need to praise her memory to keep the peace.

And I said: No more. I don’t want it anymore.

The cycle stops with me. I held that remembrance because I have better morals than to let bitterness dictate my integrity. We didn’t just sit in silence; we celebrated the things she loved. We ate her favorite foods—chili cheese dogs, French fries with gravy, and ice cream sundaes. We blew bubbles through bubble wands and played her favorite music. We even sang My Way by Frank Sinatra. Afterward, I watched Gone with the Wind, her favorite movie, and I told her I loved her and said my final fare thee well.

I did my duty. I healed the disrespect. But I refuse to inherit her whiplash. I am standing firmly in the belief that this is the absolute, definitive end of a sick, vicious generational loop.

The Myth of the Linear Path

Psychology textbooks love to hand you a neat, structured map of grief. They label the stages so cleanly: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. They make it sound like a linear ladder you climb, stepping out of one room and locking the door before entering the next.

But that is a complete myth. Everyone grieves differently, and when you are mourning a relationship as shattered and chaotic as this one, the “stages” don’t happen in order—they happen all at once, colliding like a multi-car pileup in your chest.

Where am I today? I am living in the messy intersection of all of them.

I am in full-blown Anger on her behalf because the fair-weather friends who posted performative bullshit online couldn’t be bothered to click a single link to honor her memory. I am in a quiet space of Depression when I look at the isolation of my childhood and realize how much it crippled my ability to build a community as an adult. I am in Bargaining when I pull up her saved voicemails, listening to her complain about insurance or laugh about a rotisserie oven, trying to trade the bad days for the soft ones. And yet, I am standing squarely in Acceptance—not because the past is suddenly okay, but because I finally accept that her storm is over, and I am the one who gets to rebuild the landscape.

There is no “right” way to move through this. If you are grieving a complicated person, you are allowed to be furious at 2:00 PM, heartbroken at 4:00 PM, and profoundly relieved by the time the sun goes down. You don’t owe anyone a tidy, civilized healing process.

Sifting Through the Wreckage

But if I am being totally, brutally honest, the real explosion happened this evening.

The adrenaline from the last two weeks finally ran out, and I blew up. Because when you strip away the memories, the performance, and the online guestbooks, I am the one left standing in the wreckage. She left behind no will. No life insurance. No plans. No nothing.

As Ronnie said to me tonight, she probably figured that since both myself and the void were not speaking with her at one point, there was no reason to plan anything. She probably just figured she’d let the state handle it. She never expected me to reenter her life the way I did. She never expected me to swallow my own pain, step up to the plate, and stay with her right until the very end of her life.

Yes, I am angry. I am furious because it is so profoundly, deeply unfair. It’s unfair to everyone involved, and honestly, it was unfair to herself. It forces the hard, agonizing questions to scream in your head: Could things have been different? Why couldn’t we just be a healthy family? Why is our family so fundamentally, functionally dysfunctional?

There are no neat answers to those questions. There is no closure wrapped up in a bow. There is just the cold reality of a woman who didn’t plan for the daughter who loved her enough to show up anyway.

Those are my complete thoughts for today before I go to try to rest my head and mind. I have bared it all. Every ugly, furious, beautiful scrap of it. Maybe now, the nightmares will finally end.

Ownership, Not Blame: It is Never Too Late

As I look at the isolation of my childhood and the fact that I struggle to find friends today, I am making a conscious choice. I don’t want to blame my mother or my father for how I turned out. Blame keeps me powerless, waiting for an apology from the past that will never come.

Instead, I need to make changes.

I know I am fifty-five years old, but I don’t think I am a single second too old to change my life. They wrote the first few chapters, but they do not get to hold the pen for the rest of the book. I am stepping out of survival mode and deciding to actively build the community, the connections, and the friendships I deserve right here in Tucson. The isolation ends with her.

Putting the Persona to Rest

Fourteen days ago, I put to rest fifty-five years of an abusive trauma loop. I put to rest my relationship with the person I call the void (IT)—a sister by DNA, but a stranger in every other way.

And finally, I put to rest the name that bound me to those expectations.

When the local paper printed her obituary, there it was, spelled out for the world to see: “Rosemary is survived by 2 daughters; Rachel Ro (Ronald “Ronnie”) Wright…” It listed her parents, Florian and Elizabeth. It listed her passion for old cars, gardening, and rescuing animals. It talked about how she adored Appaloosa horses, combined her beliefs in the Jehovah’s Witnesses and 7th Day Adventists, and took pride in being from Tennessee while dreaming of Wyoming. It even noted that in her later years she believed dessert should always come first.

To the readers of that guestbook, she was just a warm heart who was always there to help anyone in need. The obituary closes by saying, “Rosemary chose cremation, the family followed her wishes. There are no services being held at this time.”

The public paperwork is done. Her story is officially filed away by the world. But the name they printed for me—”Rachel Ro”—was never hyphenated. It was used as a label of expectations forced upon me, and I have hated that name for as long as I can remember. I only held off on changing it because I didn’t want to be disrespectful or dishonorable to her while she was here.

The expectations are gone now. It is time to stop living for her wants, her needs, and her criteria.

My name is Rae. I am looking into what it takes to legally change it to the name I want to have—my chosen name: Rae Cecelia Wright. I have been wanting to do it for so long, and I can finally do it now.

My mother always told me to tell the truth. In fact, throughout my childhood, she literally beat the truth out of me. Today, I am honoring that command on my own terms. I am telling the absolute, unvarnished truth of my story, because you cannot heal a community if you are hiding your own scars.

I am a woman who survived the lightning storm, swept up the broken glass, and finally walked out of the door. I am building a life with deep roots and bright light, completely on my own terms.

If you are walking barefoot on eggshells today, balancing a fairytale lie to keep someone else calm, hear me: you are allowed to stop holding your breath. You are allowed to look in the mirror and claim your freedom, too.