On Holding and Letting Go

In this triptych of poems, grief is rendered as something intimate and invasive—tracing how love fractures into mourning and how survival demands both remembrance and refusal.

This essay examines the inheritance of harm between mothers and daughters—exploring how love, protection, neglect, and violence can coexist within the same hands.

As a mother faces cancer, the writer reflects on queerness, estrangement, and return—asking how the borders we build to survive can later become paths back to love.

Drawing from work in a Washington, D.C. morgue, this essay reflects on death doulaship as a practice of presence—slowing time, holding silence, and guiding others through the first moments of mourning.