I, the epitaph
a meditation on loss and becoming.
Author’s note: This essay reflects on the quiet, complicated ways grief shapes identity - especially the kinds of losses we carry without always sharing. It’s a meditation on memory, metaphor, and meaning, written in honor of my sister, and of all the selves we become in the wake of absence. Thank you for reading with care.
ep·i·taph | /ˈepəˌtaf/ | noun 1. a phrase or form of words by which a person, time, or event will be remembered, usually with intention of inscription. Similar: elegy, commemoration, oration, legend.
Today, I am musing, as usual, in metaphor. This month marks one year that I’ve been writing and reflecting in this space. What started out as an ambition to document my life as a documentarian has turned into… something else. This practice of introspection feels at times like untangling the threads of myself, selecting one and describing it - it’s texture, where it comes from and where it’s leading, the other threads with which it’s impossibly knotted.
As you may have gathered from essays past, I love teasing apart knots between threads like gender and anger, ideals and imagination, worth and wealth, productivity and purpose and performance. Oh how satisfying it is to understand (and, sometimes, redefine) myself through my rejection of these societal confines. But, if was honest with myself, do you know what the most common source of knotting in the messy tapestry of myself really is?
Grief.
And I know, that’s probably true for many people. To experience loss is to be human, to live is to die, et cetera, et cetera… [Beat.] See how eager I am to dismiss? To not be seen as a person who is, at times, defined, driven, delineated by loss? I am (desperate to be known as) a person who has, for whom life is easy and painless. Who writes her own story on her unblemished, undamaged surface. Who is full of answers rather than gaping, gargantuan questions. And yet, here I am (as always) asking questions.
What does it mean to be a person who has lost? To be (or perceive oneself to be) the survivor of a shipwreck on a deserted island, rescued years later and forced to explain what you’ve experienced to others who have no frame of reference for said experience? What is the relative valuation of my human experience if it’s been so marked by absence?
My least secure parts wonder: what am I if I am so easily discarded? What is my softness but an impressionable surface, waiting to be carved in the shape of those I loved who’ve left? If you find yourself a home in my heart, in my library of lost souls, know that the space you occupy will never forget how it feels to hold you there.
But fear not - I have wiser, more seasoned parts. Grief is nothing if not a forge; in falling apart comes the requisite skill to put back together. Is that where creativity comes from? Absence? A need to fill emptiness with experience? To make in order to remake? What is art but a vehicle for expression of the inexpressible? A map by which we can navigate our collective unconscious?
I have always felt like a mapmaker - a shepherd, a guide. My name means light and honor. Many have known me, would define me, as an eldest daughter, cycle breaker, wayfinder, champion. Never mind the uncertainty, heaviness, toll I feel, bear, pay. I was made to lead the lost out of the darkness, and I have tried. Oh god, how hard I try. But the village wants not to see their hero weep before the dragon is slain.
Maybe I am, in part, a mirror. A portal to a more honest reality, a reflection of painful truths. Don’t like what you see? Shatter me. Blame me. Turn away, cover me. You, who placed me here, where I can do nothing but reflect your hurts? I forgive you. There are shadows lurking over the shoulder of your reflection, I am sorry for the fear you must feel seeing them now, standing so closely behind you. I have shadows too, largely in the form of people I once knew.
Light does not erase shadow - it casts it. It gives it shape. And the brighter the beam, the starker the outline. To reflect light is to reflect everything it has touched, including the sorrow it can’t burn away. Having had my formative years filled with a mirrored hall of generational shadows, I’ve learned that being luminous does not mean being untouched by darkness. It means carrying it with discernment, letting it stretch long behind you, not to haunt, but to honor.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve always felt responsible for the dark corners (mine and others’) as if noticing them somehow obligated me to lead others through. To detangle threads others can’t even see within themselves. Like Pan, leading a parade of lost children toward an impossible infinity. Some children find the sky, and some become the stars themselves - shimmering not despite the darkness, but because of it.
Come, stand in front of the light, let me see the child silhouetted inside the shell of you, curled closely into itself - a chrysalis wrapped in butterfly wing. I so easily see the child in others, when I rarely glimpse the one inside myself. I can’t help but to remember them, after they are gone. I will chart their paths, remember their names. Write them into the margins of every map I draw. Trace the contours of their absence in language and beyond, like choosing a single thread and following its route through the tapestry.
And so, perhaps I am an epitaph. A phrase, a collection of words written in the shape of the lost. A summation of people, time, occasion carved into granite, lest we forget them. And if I am an epitaph, then I am hers, theirs - my sister’s, my family’s, my ancestors’- etched in the soft, stubborn pulse of my becoming; a map of all that has been broken, and all that still grows from its ruins. I am learning to be both: the quiet stone and the living thread, holding space for the shadows behind me and the light still on its way.
This month marks the decade anniversary of my sister’s death. That I lost a younger sister is something very few people know, something I don’t really talk about. When I’m asked “how many siblings do you have,” sometimes I say one, sometimes two.
I’m not sure if it’s better to live in the past, to pretend like I am still a part of an unbroken something, or to pretend to be part of something perceptible as whole… and equally dishonest.
“I had a sister,” I could say. Like “I had a mother,” and “I had a family.” Things that were true once, but no longer. But I suppose this is how the living keep finding the light. By telling the truth, even when it shifts. By letting their shadows breathe. By shaping sorrow into something not unlike a song.
Thank you for following me as I follow this particular thread. For holding space as I pull it gently from the tangle. For reading a kind of epitaph, not carved into marble, but out of language, longing, light. I’d love to know: What thread are you holding lately, and where is it leading you?
The poetry in this piece was palpable Nora.
Thank you for the beautiful words and the vulnerability to be seen 🙏🏽