Angelversaries: A Ritual of Remembering

An offering for anyone who has lost someone they love.

My sister died 7 years ago today.

August 18, 2018 was, undoubtedly, the worst day of my life. It was a day that changed the trajectory of my entire existence. Her death re-shaped me on a cellular level, and caused a giant ripple that still reverberates through our entire family.

The first anniversary of my sister’s passing felt heavy and bleak. The memory of her death-day felt like a dark cloud, looming. In those early days, the grief was a sleeping beast that was easily reawakened. I was large and ever-present. It was a suffering unlike any I had ever known. It felt like a curse I did not deserve. I remember thinking I would never feel joy again.

On the second anniversary of her death, we planted a peach tree in the backyard of my Mom’s house. Each of the children took turns watering the soil. This marked the beginning of a yearly ritual of commemorating the day she died, and celebrating her transition from human being to ancestor.

In those early years after her death, I was struck by how grief-averse and death-averse Western culture is. I was consumed by grief, and yet, I felt like I had to tuck it away because there was no place for it to go. Social media quickly became a space for me to talk about my journey of loss. It became very clear to me that there was a cultural phenomenon around death, where right after someone dies, there is a whole lot of fanfare. Cars line the driveway. The fridge overflows with meals. The counters are covered in cards and flowers. But after a few months, the calls and the visits stop.

There are no rituals to commemorate the days our loved ones die. There are no traditions around celebrating their birthday. We are expected to take a few weeks of bereavement and get back to business as usual. This, to me, feels like a loss on top of a loss. Not only must we contend with the emotional burden of grief, we have to soldier on in a society that tries to make it invisible.

For me, celebrating an ancestor/angel-versary is a way of reclaiming our sacred connection to our friends and family who are no longer with us in the physical realm . It’s a way of marking the time — another four seasons without them, another cycle completed.

When someone close to you dies, it changes you. Life as you know it no longer exists. And the transition from being alive to being an angel is its own kind of birth. All of this, I think, is worthy of acknowledgement in some ritual way.

In her essay “Embracing Grief,” Sobunfu Somé writes, “I believe the future of our world depends greatly on the manner in which we handle our grief.” She goes on to offer, “We need to begin to see grief not as foreign entity and not as an alien to be held down or caged up, but as a natural process.”

Grief is natural rite of passage that we each must experience in this life. We do ourselves a great disservice when we don’t treat it with reverence and respect.

To remember literally means to “put your parts together again,” — to make yourself whole. Commemorating angelversaries is an ongoing practice of healing, of gathering up all the pieces that fell apart, and making some sense of life after loss.

If you’ve lost a loved one, I encourage you to start a ritual of honoring the day they became an ancestor. Light a candle. Get their favorite flowers. Eat the snack they’d ask you to get from the grocery store. Play a song they’d sing at the top of their lungs on a long car ride. Pull out the photos. Even if it hurts. Even if the ache rumbles in your chest, speak their name aloud. Don’t let them disappear. You are the keeper of their memory, and their life deserves to be honored for the blessing that it was.

In loving memory of Chemin Joy Reddy, 12/4/1987 - 08/18/2018.