When people ask me how we got through that moment, that time, how we managed it all, I tell them about my mother, Cherice. I tell them about a woman who worked from can’t see in the morning until can’t see at night. I tell them about a woman whose own family had disavowed her but who refused to be a person who disavowed anyone in return. My mother wove us together, my brothers, sister and I, into a tight and strong complex quilt and she called it us and it was, and it is, us.
