My older sister and I were both named after our grandmothers. She was Rebecca, I was Kathryn. Becky and Katie. After that, our parents ran out of grandmothers and had to get creative with our two younger sisters. I always loved that part of me — a name that reaches back through the women who carried it. Mothers, daughters.
Then my sister died, and I had to figure out how to keep living with the name on my chest.
Becky died on May 14th, 2018, after a long three years of aggressive cervical cancer. My life split into two: the person I was before she got sick, and the person I am now. Those three years live in their own intermission — a horror movie where she dies and the rest of us keep living, but die in our own smaller ways. Anyone who has lost someone close to cancer knows exactly what that is. Anyone who has watched hope vanish, helplessly, knows it. A figure of skin and bones in a bed who couldn’t be my sister but was my sister. And then nothing. Gone forever. It still hurts just as much, if I let myself think about it for more than a moment.
I was a different person after she died — but the biggest change came a year later, when I became a mother. My baby was due in June, but my water broke in the middle of the night, a few weeks early. It was Mother’s Day. In the car to the hospital, in the dark, I prayed to Becky. Please, not May 14th — not the same day she died. I couldn’t bear to load all that grief onto a tiny baby. But our little girl came quickly, a mercifully short delivery. It was May 13, 2019. I held her and I cried — for joy and for sadness, both at once.
Love is the biggest force in our lives. It’s our greatest happiness, and it’s the thing that hurts the most. Becoming a mother in the shadow of my biggest loss taught me a few things. It showed me I had more strength than I knew. It showed me that grief doesn’t have an ending point — it carves a space in your life and lives there, day to day. And it showed me that grief is neither good nor bad. You make peace with it, in your own way, because it’s there, and because you have to keep living. So you live together.
I had my daughter, and a baby boy not long after. By then it had been a few years since Becky died. Every night, my husband and I took turns lying down with the kids to get them to sleep — they never did take to being left in the crib to settle on their own. Someone had to be there. That’s maybe an hour of being still, in the dark, next to a tiny child, listening to them breathe softly, waiting for the moment you can tiptoe out. You learn the pattern of sounds that tells you they’re truly asleep. A sleeping baby can sometimes sound like a soft musical sigh.
Hummmm.
Hummmm.
They were so beautiful, my babies. I’d get overwhelmed with love, my heart aching while they were right in front of me. Being a parent can be like that. In those quiet evening hours, my mind kept going to a story — to Rebecca. I wrote my children’s book line by line in my head that way, polishing it like a gem. I had to put words to everything I felt; I had to write the grief out of myself, because I needed to learn to live with it.
But I couldn’t write about Becky directly. Her death is still an open wound, I think even you can tell. So I went to the name itself. Rebecca — a name passed down here and there, all the way back to the 18th century, where you meet the Rebecca of my book. Her name was Rebecca Lombard Smith, and she was our great-great-great-great-grandmother.
Rebecca was pregnant with her last child when her husband David went through the ice by Port Hood Island in March 1789. Most stories about this center on the father — Captain David Smith, a whaling captain — and the tragedy of how he died. But for me, it’s Rebecca who stands out. She’s the one who lives on and raises the children, all alone, on a small island off the coast of Cape Breton. Many lines of descendants come from that family of six sons and one daughter; mine comes from the daughter. It’s the mother’s name that carried through my family. It’s the mother’s strength I saw in my sister, fighting to live with everything she had. It’s the strength I found in myself, when I had to.
When Becky was sick, I lived in a house in the village of Port Hood. I could see Port Hood Island from the window. It’s lonesome out there in the waves, especially in winter — no one lives there full time anymore. I was still in Port Hood after Becky died, when I became a mother. I used to look at that island and think of Rebecca. Her children survived, every one of them. My sister’s story ends in loss, but Rebecca’s ends in hope — for all the loss she endured. I could write that.
I used to strap the baby to my chest, take the dog, and walk as far as I could before my back started straining (baby carriers never did suit me well). It turns out “as far as I could” was about as far as a place called the Old Protestant Graveyard and back. That’s where Rebecca Lombard Smith is buried. This is the inscription on her stone, transcribed from the headstone itself at the Old Protestant Graveyard in Port Hood:
Here lies the remains of Rebecca Smith who was born in Truro NEW ENGLAND with her husband CAPTAIN DAVID SMITH who was lost on the ice back on Port Hood in the year 1789. Who died on the 30th November A.D. 1821 in the 76th year of her age. This stone was erected to her memory by her sons Lewis Parker David.
I remember thinking — wow, 76. She lived a long time. She lived a whole lifetime more than her husband. I wonder if it was unusual that her sons carved their names into it, too? I looked around and didn’t see any other stone with that kind of personal touch. I don’t have an answer for why they did it, and I probably never will. But to me, it’s a way of saying: this is our mother. We loved her.
Sometimes grief and love ache so much that you need to put them into words. I felt connected to people who lived and died hundreds of years ago. I felt that tie as something true. Then I’d turn around and walk home, the dog trotting beside me, the baby strapped to my chest and fast asleep — that little sound keeping time with my steps.
Hummmm.
Hummmm.
If grief has touched your life and you want a book that names it without flinching, Rebecca by Kate Beaton is where I’d start. It’s a children’s picture book about loss — an adult protagonist, two people who die, all the “rules” you’d expect a publisher to push back on — and it still got made. It’s the book I wrote in my head during those quiet, dark hours, and it’s the one I hand to people who are hurting and don’t know how to say it.
The 2-Minute Fix
Next time grief hits you somewhere inconvenient — in a hotel room at 2 a.m., in the back seat of a car, in a line at the airport — don’t fight it or fix it. Just name it out loud, to yourself. “I’m sad. I miss her. I’m still angry.” Twenty seconds. Grief shrinks when it gets a name, even a quiet one.
Glow doesn’t wait — and neither do you.