What the Women in My Family Bury With Them
They buried what they couldn’t say. I wrote what they couldn’t keep.
They let me listen. This is what I heard.
This piece is part of Section 1: The Blood Remembers—the opening breath of Kinfolk.
But this one didn’t come from my own bloodline.
It came from sitting in a room full of women who trusted me with theirs.
We were talking about history—quietly, collectively.
And someone said something so simple, so staggering,
that it stayed with me like a rhythm.
After asking permission, and explaining what I hoped to do,
they said yes.
This essay is born from that yes.
It’s not biography. It’s not fiction.
It’s a record of how legacy sounds when it’s spoken out loud—
and how sacred it feels to be allowed to listen.
What the Women in My Family Bury With Them
The ritual begins before the body stops breathing.
Mama’s mama taught her, and her mama before that, stretching back to women whose names we lost somewhere between the cotton fields and the city limits. They knew what the living couldn’t bear to carry, what the dead shouldn’t have to face eternity holding. So they made choices. Sacred decisions about what gets buried and what gets kept, what secrets go to the grave and which ones get whispered to the next generation over Sunday dinner.
They fold the mirrors with old pillowcases first, tie off the corners like swollen ankles. No one raises their voice when the mirrors go dark—not even the babies, who cry softer, sensing the shift in air. The women work in silence, hands moving with the muscle memory of grief, each gesture a prayer they learned before they learned to read.
Great-grandmother Adelaide buried her wedding ring three times. The first time was when she married him—a ceremony for the dead girl she had to become to survive the living. The second time was when she left him, in the backyard behind the peach tree that never bore fruit. The third time was when she died, her finger bare for forty years but the ring still traveling with her, wrapped in tissue paper and tucked into her burial dress pocket. She told Mama, “Some promises follow you even after you break them.”
They bury perfume bottles half full—Chanel No. 5 that Aunt Lorraine saved for special occasions that never came, a bruised rose from Avon that smelled like Saturday nights and stolen kisses, the kind of scent that lives longer than the body that wore it. Great-aunt Celia was buried with White Shoulders, the bottle still holding maybe two sprays, because she said heaven might not have drugstores and she’d be damned if she met Jesus smelling like anything but a lady.
They bury the name they were given and the one they almost dared to choose.
Mama’s sister was born Patricia but everyone called her Pat until she decided she wanted to be called Storm. She practiced signing it on napkins, in steam on the bathroom mirror, in the margins of her school books. Storm. Like the way her laugh could shake a room. Like the way she could clear the air just by walking into it. But she never made it past eighteen, never made it to the courthouse to make it legal, so they buried her with both names carved into the headstone. Patricia “Storm” Williams. Even in death, they couldn’t let her choose just one.
A silver locket with no picture goes down with them. Always empty, always clean, always polished to a shine that could blind you if you caught it in the sun just right. Mama asked her grandmother why she wore it with nothing inside, and she said, “Baby, sometimes keeping space for love matters more than having proof it existed.”
They bury the hush.
The things that happened in rooms with closed doors. The bruises that bloomed like ugly flowers on arms and thighs, always hidden under long sleeves and longer skirts. The way Cousin Diane would flinch when her husband reached for the salt, how she’d count the steps from the kitchen to the bedroom like she was calculating escape routes. The silence that grew thick as molasses between question and answer when the pastor asked if anyone knew why she fell down those stairs so often.
They bury the don’t tell nobody.
The midnight runs to the clinic on the other side of town. The envelopes of cash tucked into coat pockets. The way certain phone numbers got memorized but never written down. The code words—“visiting my sister in Memphis,” “getting some fresh air,” “going to pray about it”—that meant the same thing to every woman who heard them. The names of doctors who asked no questions, nurses who looked the other way, friends who could drive you home and never mention the blood on your dress.
Aunt Vivian buried a birthday card unsigned, the ink still wet from tears she cried while writing it. Twenty-three years she’d been trying to find the words to tell her son she loved him even though she couldn’t love who he loved. Twenty-three years of birthday cards written and rewritten, signed and unsigned, addressed and left unstamped. When she died, they found seventeen of them in her jewelry box, each one dated a different year, each one saying the same thing in different words: “I’m sorry I don’t know how to love you out loud.”
They bury three strands of another woman’s hair.
Not because they hated the other woman, but because they understood her. Because they knew what it felt like to love someone who couldn’t love you back the way you needed. Because they knew that sometimes sharing a man was easier than being alone, and sometimes being alone was harder than sharing. The hair would be wrapped in tissue, placed in a small box, buried with the prayer that wherever she was, she found someone who could love her completely.
Sometimes, they bury the switchblade cleaned twice, wrapped in a handkerchief stitched with lilies. The blade that never drew blood but lived in the purse just in case. The weight of it against their hip when they walked home from work, from church, from the grocery store. The comfort of knowing they could protect themselves if the world decided to take more than they were willing to give. The peace of mind that came from being prepared for the worst while praying for the best.
They bury the letter she rewrote five times and never mailed.
Dear Daughter. Dear Son. Dear God. Dear Anyone Who Might Listen. The words that needed saying but never found the right moment, the right tone, the right person to receive them. Confessions that would have changed everything and nothing. Apologies for choices made and unmade. Love letters to children who grew up too fast, to men who left too soon, to themselves when they were young and still believed in fairy tale endings.
The lace slip she wore when she still wanted to be touched goes with them too. Yellowed now, elastic gone slack, but still smelling faintly of the perfume she used to spray on her pulse points when she was trying to seduce her own husband. Back when she thought marriage meant partnership, when she thought love meant forever, when she still believed her body was something beautiful instead of something that needed forgiving.
Sometimes, they bury a photograph of themselves from the year before the silence settled in. Just one. Just enough. The woman they were before they learned to make themselves smaller, before they stopped laughing too loud, before they traded their dreams for other people’s comfort. The face that knew how to smile without asking permission, eyes that looked straight ahead instead of down, hands that reached for what they wanted instead of only what they were offered.
And always, always, they bury the rage.
The white-hot fury that had nowhere to go except inward. The anger at systems that failed them, at men who used them, at children who didn’t understand the sacrifices they made, at themselves for accepting less than they deserved. The rage gets wrapped in scripture, dressed up in forgiveness, buried so deep it becomes part of the soil that feeds the flowers on their graves.
But here’s what they don’t bury:
The recipes written in margins, the ones you have to feel your way through because the measurements are “a little bit” and “until it looks right.” The humming that happens while cooking, the songs that get passed down without words, the melodies that know how to comfort even when nothing else does.
The way they taught us to pray—not just with words, but with work. With clean houses and full bellies and children who knew they were loved even when they weren’t understood. With strength disguised as submission, with rebellion hidden in obedience, with revolution wrapped in the daily act of survival.
The stories they told while braiding hair, while folding laundry, while watching their hands move through motions their mothers taught them and their grandmothers before that. Stories that sounded like gossip but were really history, that seemed like entertainment but were actually instruction manuals for how to navigate a world that wasn’t built for their survival.
They leave us the language of glances, the grammar of silence, the vocabulary of things that can’t be said out loud but still need to be communicated. They leave us the knowledge of which battles to fight and which ones to walk away from, which hills to die on and which ones to let someone else claim.
They leave us their faith—not the kind that fits neatly into church pews, but the kind that wakes up every morning and chooses to keep going even when every rational part of the brain says to give up. The faith that believes in tomorrow even when today is trying to kill you, that trusts in love even when love keeps disappointing you, that knows there’s something sacred in the act of enduring.
Most importantly, they leave us the permission to be different.
To bury different things, to keep different secrets, to make different choices. To break the patterns that broke them, to heal the wounds they couldn’t acknowledge, to love ourselves in ways they never learned how. They leave us the freedom to honor their legacy while refusing to repeat their mistakes, to remember their sacrifices while making sure our own children never have to make the same ones.
When my time comes—and it will come, just like it came for them—I already know what I want to bury with me. This collection of words, maybe. The fear that I’m not enough, definitely. The apologies I made for existing, absolutely.
But I also know what I want to leave above ground: the truth they couldn’t speak, the love they couldn’t show, the peace they couldn’t find. The sound of my own voice saying exactly what I mean, the sight of my own hands reaching for exactly what I want, the feeling of my own heart beating without asking permission.
That’s what the women in my family really taught me, even when they were teaching me to stay silent: that someday, someone would need to speak for all of us. That someday, someone would need to dig up what we buried and decide what deserved to see the light.
Today, I am that someone. And I choose light.
I choose to bury the shame and keep the strength, to bury the silence and keep the stories, to bury the fear and keep the faith that there’s always another way to love, always another way to live, always another way to be.
The women in my family taught me how to bury things.
But they also taught me how to bloom.
If this piece stayed with you, carry it.
Speak it where silence still lingers.
Some things were never lost—only waiting to be seen.
Kinfolk continues next week.
Until then, leave a cup.
coff.ee/unspunworld
I waited to read this again, and i'm glad I did, because I needed this today. Thank you 🙏