He Carries One Eighth Of Her

He is not here yet.

But I am already looking for her in him.

My second grandson is coming. And before he has drawn his first breath, before I have held him, before the world has had a single moment with him I am already doing the quiet, trembling, deeply personal mathematics of grief and genetics.

One eighth.

That is how much of my mother, the late Beverly E. Carroll, my Miss Bee, lives biologically in this child who is still becoming on the other side of my daughter's skin. One eighth of her blood. One eighth of her DNA. One eighth of the woman who was the center of my entire world, who died four months before she got to meet my first grandson, who wanted so desperately to see the babies that would come from her only child.

One eighth sounds like a small number until you understand what it contains.

One eighth of her is enough to stop me completely. Because one eighth of Miss Bee is more love than most people carry in their entirety.

The Mathematics of Grief and New Life

I did not expect to become a grandmother twice after losing my mother. I did not dare to imagine it.

When Miss Bee died in October 2018 — four months before my first grandson arrived, I spent a long time sitting with the specific grief of knowing she would never hold him. She had talked about him before he existed. She had loved the idea of him before he had a face. And then she was gone before she ever got to see what her love had made possible.

That first grandson arrived carrying one eighth of her without knowing it. And the day I looked into his face for the first time I was doing what every grieving grandmother does in that moment — searching. Quietly. Almost guiltily. Looking for the nose, the complexion, the particular way the eyes sit, the something that says she was here. She is still here. She came through.

And now there is another one coming.

Another one eighth.

Another face I will search with the same trembling hope not because I need him to look like her to love him, but because every trace of her that makes it into the world feels like proof that love does not end. It just changes its form.

Every child born after a great loss is living proof that life chose to continue anyway. That love found another vessel. That the people we have lost are not finished arriving in the world.

What Nobody Tells You About Loving Someone After Loss

There is a specific psychology to loving a new person deeply when you are still grieving another.

It is not simple joy. It is not uncomplicated gratitude. It is both of those things woven through with something more layered a love that arrives already carrying grief inside it. A happiness that knows what it cost to get here. A tenderness that understands, in a way that pre-loss love cannot, exactly how finite and precious and irreplaceable every single moment of it is.

I love my grandchildren differently than I would have loved them if my mother were still alive. Not more. Not less. Differently. With more presence. More intention. More of the particular attention that grief teaches you to pay to the things that matter before they are gone.

Because grief taught me at the highest possible cost that the people you love are not permanent. That the ordinary Tuesday afternoon with someone you love is not guaranteed. That the phone call you keep meaning to make is not promised a tomorrow.

So when I hold this new grandson I will hold him the way Miss Bee would have held him if she were here. With everything. Without reservation. With the full undivided weight of a love that knows exactly what it is worth.

Grief taught me to love the living with the same ferocity I use to honor the dead. Because now I know with a certainty I wish I did not have that the living do not stay forever either.

The Secret Anxious Watching

I have not told many people about this part.

The secret anxious watching that happens when you are a griever awaiting a new life. The way I catch myself hoping — quietly, almost superstitiously — that he will have her nose. Her complexion. The particular way Miss Bee's eyes crinkled at the corners when she was about to laugh.

It is not rational. I know that. The genetics of inheritance do not work on request. A child does not arrive carrying the specific features you are hoping for simply because you need to see them.

But grief is not rational. And hope is not rational. And the love of a daughter for her mother — eight years after her death, still looking for her face in every new face that carries her blood — is the least rational and most human thing I know.

I am not ashamed of the watching. I am not ashamed of the hoping. I am not ashamed of the tears that will arrive the moment I see him for the first time; whether he looks like her or not because the tears will not be about whether the genetics delivered what I hoped for.

They will be about the fact that she is still arriving. In new skin. In new hands. In a new small face that contains one eighth of everything she was.

And one eighth of Miss Bee is enough to undo me completely. In the best possible way.

I am not looking for her ghost in his face. I am looking for her continuation. Her echo. The proof that love leaves something behind that death cannot reach.

To My Daughter — The Woman Who Chose This Twice

I want to say something publicly that I carry privately every single day.

My daughter did not have to choose parenthood. She certainly did not have to choose it twice — once in the shadow of her grandmother's death, and now again, years later, in the continued landscape of that loss.

But she and her longtime partner chose it. They chose to bring life into a family that has known profound loss. They chose to give me the specific and irreplaceable gift of watching Miss Bee's legacy continue to arrive in the world in new forms.

I am grateful for that choice in a way I cannot fully articulate. Not just as a grandmother awaiting a new grandchild. But as a grieving daughter who needed, more than she knew, to have something to look forward to. Something that was unambiguously new. Something that belonged to the future rather than the past.

My daughter gave me that. Twice.

And when I hold this new grandson and search his face for one eighth of Miss Bee — I will also be seeing one hundred percent of my daughter's love. Her courage. Her choice to keep building a family even in the aftermath of loss.

That is its own kind of miracle.

An Invitation

If you are a griever who has experienced this - the searching for your lost person in the face of a new child, the complicated joy of loving someone new while still honoring someone gone, the specific tenderness of watching your loved one's genetics arrive in a new generation, I want you to know that you are not alone in it.

You are not morbid for looking. You are not unhealthy for hoping. You are not failing to move on because the arrival of new life makes you think of the person who is no longer here to witness it.

You are a person who loved someone so completely that their absence shows up even in your joy. And that is not grief interfering with your happiness.

That is love. In its most enduring and most human form.

Come with me as I await him. Come with me as I watch and hope and search and love. Come with me as Miss Bee's one eighth finds its way into the world one more time.

I will let you know what I find.

He does not know yet that he carries her. But I already know. And when I hold him for the first time I will be holding one eighth of the greatest love I have ever known — arriving again, in a new face, in a new life, in a world she left too soon. That is not grief. That is Miss Bee refusing to be finished.

— Kinyatta E. Gray, Honoring Miss Bee 🐝

About The Author

Kinyatta E. Gray is a bestselling author, grief educator, and 2023 Remarkable Women Award winner. She is the founder of Honoring Miss Bee, a grief healing brand created after losing her mother, the late Beverly E. Carroll, in 2018. She writes about grief the way it actually is - without clinical jargon, without platitudes, and without rushing anyone through the most human experience there is. She is a daughter, a grandmother, and a woman who believes that love does not end. It just changes its form.

honoringmissbee.org  |  Etsy: HonoringMissBee  |  Podcast: Grieving Unapologetically  |  Music: Music In Stilettos

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