On December 22, I remember…
- Lisa Raie
- Dec 22, 2025
- 1 min read
This year is the first birthday of my dear Auntie Raie since she passed from this world.
She was my mother’s oldest sister.
My godmother.
The woman whose name I was given
and therefore, in so many ways, the woman who stood quietly at the beginning of my own story.
Every year on this day, without fail, I would ring her to wish her a happy birthday.
It became a ritual of sorts ~ ordinary, faithful, never questioned.
This year, the call lives only in memory,
and I find myself speaking the words softly into the quiet instead.
Auntie Raie and I shared a deep love for family history.
We spoke often about ancestry, about names, places, inheritances that travelled through time not just in records, but in temperament, faith, and love.
Those conversations are among my most cherished keepsakes.
They shaped how I see myself, not as the woman standing alone, but as carried.
This morning my heart especially holds her husband, my uncle, and her children my cousins and their families.
Grief does not move in straight lines, and anniversaries have a way of reopening rooms we thought were settled.
May they feel held today, even in ways unseen.
Auntie Raie is deeply missed.
But she is not lost.
She is remembered.
She is spoken.
She is named , again and again in love.
And that, I believe, is one of the holiest forms of presence we have.
xox
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