The Wealth My Mother Left Me
April 5, 1994
Mommy Died Last Night
My mother's words.
As I sit on the airplane bound for Atlanta, Georgia the day before my forty-fifth birthday, I reflect back ten weeks ago when I watched my beloved mother take her last breath in this life as Mamie. That one last inhale and exhale that allowed her spirit to escape her cancer prison.
How that last breath passed so quietly by me, and yet her spirit was suddenly all around me and in me.
It was such an overwhelming moment of shock for me with happiness for her that she was now on her way home to Father God in heaven. I know in my heart and mind that a way had been prepared for her spiritual journey home. I know it just as surely as I followed her directions to make the preparations for her beautiful body to be caressed by the earth that she was made of.
Mommy, I love you deeply and I miss you far more than words can express.
October 30, 2024
Mom,
You left us a few weeks back on September 16, 2024. In a way, I am still in shock.
You battled with dementia for the past five years, and I watched that bold and brave version I knew slowly disappear. It was pretty cruel. Your strength and your voice were the very things I watched slip away day by day.
I have been a nurse and cared for others for many years. Watching Big Pop, your daddy, in the hospital was part of what motivated me as I watched the nurses at his bedside taking care of him. Still, nothing could have prepared me for the humility it would take to care for you.
I would go through your photos and watch your smile disappear. One year, a vibrant smile. The next, a flat affect.
You always taught me to look for the lesson in every situation. Well, I have a few to share that surprised me.
The humility shaped during that season taught me another level of perspective. Was I living life, or was I just surviving it?
I'm so glad I reduced my hours at work to help Sister and spend time with you. I didn't know the time from February to September would become so sacred. I have peace because I know I did my part until the very end.
I came into this world as your baby that you cared for and nurtured. I then cared for and nurtured you, and you left this world as mine.
You know, reading your letter made me admit that we are alike in many ways.
I, too, did something daring and went on my first solo trip. I literally woke up, in true Brenda fashion, picked a location, London, booked the flight and hotel, told everyone I was going, and left.
I really needed that time to ground myself and check in to know that I was okay. I expected to stay in the hotel room and cry the whole time. I figured that would finally be the moment to release everything I had carried while being strong for everyone else.
Woman, I had the time of my life and then some.
I got lost and laughed about it, ate some wonderful food, had afternoon tea and even visited the White Cliffs of Dover.
In true Brenda fashion, I met interesting strangers and held lovely conversations with them. The kind you somehow always managed to find wherever you went.
The retired judge from California and her best friend. We laughed together for an hour.
The woman who lost her husband and travels every year around this time.
The sisters from Sweden I met on a tour. We ended up walking across Tower Bridge together, and they became my photographers along the way.
The Uber driver I talked with so deeply about God, marriage and life that I completely missed my time for the London Eye. I hope he married that girl he told me about. She's the one.
July 25, 1996
It Still Hurts to Know She's Gone
My mother's words, two years later.
I've relocated to Atlanta, Georgia from New Haven, Connecticut with my youngest child, Lynai. Today as I was purging through boxes that remain unpacked, I found this letter of expression written by me.
It's been two years since Mommy died, and as I read this letter I realized that I have been holding a lot of hurt. When I read the words “Mommy died last night” it shocked me as though it just occured. It felt like I didn't know she was gone.
I shook and moaned as the tears rolled down my cheeks. All I can say is, “Thank you God for taking care of me to be able to go on in life after your mother dies.”
September 17, 2026
Mom,
Two years.
A lot has happened since I last wrote to you.
I'm divorced now. There's a story in that, and perhaps more of your boldness and bravery in me than I realized. I left my own house. He can have it. I just wanted peace and freedom.
The kids continue to be quite brilliant and inquisitive. Some days I wish I could call you and laugh about how their questions can challenge even the more seasoned intellectuals.
Yes, we still go to the museums, the park, art galleries, the theatre, and even this cool makerspace center that has 3D printing.
Oh, and the Peabody Museum was renovated and has since reopened. You would absolutely love it! I swear, at one point in time we could have made that place our home address.
The more I think about who I've become over these last two years, the more I recognize pieces of you.
Who gets an associate's degree in radiology and somehow ends up working in finance at Ernst & Young?
Or what about the time you fell and bumped your head and, weeks later, decided you were going to run for alderwoman? I swear I thought you surely suffered a traumatic brain injury. The whole family was a little concerned.
Then you started canvassing. You sat with the people of the community and listened to their concerns. Fast forward to election time, and you won by a landslide.
Funny enough, I ran into Rosa this summer while waiting for a train to New London. It was my first time taking the kids on CT Rail. Once again, saying hello to a stranger opened a door I couldn't have anticipated. She knew you. She remembered you as her alderwoman.
Wait, one more.
Remember that summer you decided to live in the dorm and stayed at Schwartz Hall at 67 years old?
Who does that?
You did.
You made a transformative impact in a lot of people's lives, and it is still remembered. Every now and again during an introduction I hear, “That's Brenda's daughter.”
That I am, and that I am forever proud to be.
What We Inherit
It wasn't until I placed our words beside each other that I noticed the dates. My mother wrote Mommy Died Last Night in 1994. I wrote my first letter to her in 2024. She returned to her writing two years later in 1996, and here I am doing the same in 2026.
Thirty years between a daughter grieving her mother and another daughter grieving hers.
There was something else I began to notice as I read my mother's words. I recognized them. Not the stories themselves, but something in the way she told them. My mother was profoundly poetic and expressive. She could take an experience and find meaning inside it. She wrote about people, faith, love, loss and the things she observed along the way.
Her mother wrote too. Three generations of women who wrote.
Perhaps The Trendie Tribune didn't begin with me after all. I thought I was building something new when I started writing and sharing stories. Now I wonder if I was also continuing something old.
We talk a lot about generational wealth, usually in the context of money, property, investments, businesses and the financial assets one generation is able to leave to the next. Those things matter. They can change the trajectory of a family. Yet some inheritance arrives through a bank account, and some arrives on yellowed paper.
I am a beneficiary.
Legacy is what my mother left. Inheritance is what I received. Stewardship is what I do with it. Generational wealth is what continues beyond me.
I inherited stories, faith, curiosity, courage and a way of observing people and the world around me. Perhaps even this compulsion I have to put it all into words. The older I get, the more I understand that receiving a gift and stewarding it are two very different things.
Long before I had the language for that responsibility, I was learning it.
My first true culturally immersive trip was to Egypt and Ghana, where my mother was also with me. I wrote every day in my journal and listened to my mother's profoundly elaborate and expressive perspective of her experience. My mentor organized the group trip that would change my life.
Looking back, I realize that journey was teaching me stewardship of a destination and its stories before I had full knowledge of my responsibility. There is nuance to how stories are shared, as well as the vulnerability, dignity and humility required to share them.
That responsibility still shapes the way I travel and write today. I try to enter a place willing to listen before interpreting, to allow what I encounter to challenge what I thought I knew and to resist reducing people, cultures and communities into stories that are easier for others to consume. When I do share a story, I want the humanity of the people within it to remain larger than the story I am telling.
Stewardship has also made me think differently about what I am passing forward. I want my children to have a safe space to be both seen and heard, as well as respected for their individual genius and creativity. I want to pass down confidence so they know they don't need to shrink for the comfort of others and that you're never “too much” when you find your tribe.
I want to pass down resilience because nothing good or worth fighting for comes without resistance. I keep friction in their childhood to combat entitlement. I wish for them to have built the capacity to receive the inheritance of wisdom, faith and hope.
Some things hold more value than money. I wish for them to recognize those things when they receive them and to steward their inheritance with integrity and true joy.
Maybe that is what I understand differently now. Generational wealth is not only about what we are able to leave behind. It is also about building the capacity in the next generation to recognize the value of what they have received.
My grandmother wrote. My mother wrote. Now I write.
Thirty years ago, my mother put her grief, her faith and her reflections on paper. She couldn't have known exactly how those words would find their way into my hands at this moment, or what I would come to recognize in them.
I thought I was preserving my mother's words when I began writing this.
Instead, I discovered part of my inheritance.
Now it is mine to steward.
Lynai Mufungizi
Suggested Reading: The Expectations We Pack
