I just returned from my great aunt’s funeral. The service was wonderful. My family, as ever, inspire me and leave me with a little more hope for the world than when I arrived.

My great aunt was born in 1930. 1930. Imagine being a black girl born the year after a stock market crash so bad that people were jumping off of roofs, born between the two biggest wars in human history, all while every aspect of your life is still boxed and barred in by your race and your gender and your economic status, yet still finding your way to a college degree to do whatever an intelligent person with all of those barriers can do. And for all of her days, she carried a life mission to help the next generation.

My great aunt lived a rich life. I won’t relay it all here. I wouldn’t do it justice, because I was never close enough to her to learn her whole story. I wish I had been. But she was the very example of the women of my family.

Knowing her time was near, the pastor visited my great aunt in hospice. She asked her what she would like to have said of her at her service, My great aunt paraphrased Sullivan Pugh, saying, “Let the life I’ve lived speak for me.”

I wish that you could meet or could have met the women in my family; my mother, my grandmothers, my great grandmother, my aunts, my great aunts, my cousins. I wish that you could talk to them and get to know them. If you live in Baltimore, you might have been tended to by one of them without ever knowing who they were.

They have been teachers, nurses, veterans, police officers, administrators, singers, cooks, leaders, and spouses of people doing all of those works. They are everywhere helping people. They raise children, sometimes alone, sometimes not even their own. They support each other and the rest of us in the worst of times so that we have not a worry in the world. During strife, we wisely turn to those who are not strangers to it.

These women are somehow both marble column and warm blanket, a sense of urgency and a calming perspective, passing on their knowledge when you need it at times, and other times making sorrow joyful and fun. Because it is not wrong to laugh at pain if it is your own pain. Such is the talent of those familiar with persistent suffering.

Whether we are attending a funeral, a reunion, or just visiting someone’s home, these women will always have a smile and a hug for you. Yet behind their smiles and love is a knot of hot iron nails bouncing around inside their torsos. Look and you’ll see it. There are clouds behind their eyes.

I’ll likely never know what placed them there; some horror, some impossibly unfair choice, some love lost, some hope burned away, some persistent hurt that they have borne over a lifetime, or all of those over and over again. But they keep it inside, away from you. Because they know how to bear pain. Because, though you think you do, too, you do not.

And, because I love them, I foolishly try to hug it away from them.

A funeral is a strange function to leave feeling better about the world. But I do. My great aunt was a wonderful, intelligent, hard-working, caring, and decent person. Her time came as naturally as the season in which she passed away. She left a net good in the world, though many of the beneficiaries of her good works will never know about her influence.

This is the kind of person I wish more people could meet. These women, to me, are great, in the old sense of the word, as used to describe Alexander or Catherine. That balance of strength, kindness, and decency, as far as I know, cannot be taught. Yet the culture of my family is defined by it, by them. And much of the next generation seems to have gotten that message.

The women of my family; I wish everyone had them. They are, were, and will always be to me, Queens.

With greatest affection,
-CG