Three necklaces, one altar.

As Samhain approaches, I find myself drawn to my altar more and more. I am sitting with my grandmothers.

There are two photographs sitting side by side.

To the left is Della, my Black Dominican grandmother. Beside her are red and yellow wooden beads from the island. I never got to meet her. The stories of displacement, diaspora, Windrush and generational suffering meant our paths never crossed. Not in human form, anyway.

There is so much about her I don’t know. What made her laugh, what frightened her, what she dreamed of, what she had to leave behind. I wonder about the woman she was, beyond the fragments of stories that have reached me.

To the right is Hilda, my white English grandmother. Beside her are the cream beads she wore as a young woman and later passed on to me.

Hilda, I knew intimately as nana.

I knew her voice, her hands, the way she moved through the world. I had the privilege of being with her as she took her last breath earlier this year. I still find myself reaching for her in the ordinary moments of my life.

Two grandmothers. Two very different lives.
One I knew so well, the other I never had the chance to know.

Both are here, in me.

This morning, I gathered my own necklace. The one that journeys with me wherever I go to hold space. It has been with me through so many circles, rituals, thresholds and chapters of my life. I placed it across theirs.
Three necklaces, their beads resting together, some tangled, some lying gently alongside one another.

I sat looking at them.
Thinking about the lives these beads have travelled through. The bodies they have rested against. The places they have been. The things they have witnessed.
I wondered what Della would make of the woman I have become, what she might recognise in me, what we might have shared had life allowed us to know one another.

I thought about Hilda, about how much of her I carry in ways I am only beginning to understand.

I lit two candles and simply sat there. Nothing to do or resolve, simply to be in the presence of three necklaces, two candles and the feeling of being in the company of my grandmothers.

This is something I have come to love about ritual.

It gives us a way to do something with the love that remains.

We cannot reach across and hold the hand of someone who has died. We cannot ask all the questions we wish we had asked. We cannot recover every story that was lost along the way.

But we can light a candle. We can speak their names and place something precious beside their photograph. We can make a little space in our lives for the relationship to continue in another form.

Sometimes, something as simple as arranging three necklaces can open a doorway into a grief we didn’t even know was waiting for our attention.

As I sat there, I found myself thinking about my daughter. These are her ancestors too.
She carries their stories in her own body, whether she knows them or not. The histories of migration and belonging, of love and loss.

I wonder what she will remember of me one day. What objects she might hold in her hands. What stories she will tell, what she will choose to carry forward and what she will feel free to lay down.

There is something deeply moving about recognising ourselves as part of this long line of lives.

We inherit so much more than we realise.

Ritual is one way we can begin to tend that inheritance with greater care.

At Samhain, when the veil between the living and the dead is traditionally said to grow thin, we are invited to remember. To honour those who came before us, make room for grief, gratitude, unfinished stories and enduring love.

I wonder how many of us are carrying grief that has never really had anywhere to go.
Not only grief for those who have died, but grief for the people we never got to know.

The homes and homelands left behind, the love we needed and didn’t receive, the world we are watching change, the lives we imagined, and the ones we are actually living.

There is so much grief in being human, and so little space in our everyday lives to give it the attention it deserves.

I have come to understand that grief needs more than our private endurance. It needs tending. It needs beauty. It needs expression. And often, it needs other people.

We were never meant to do this alone.

As Samhain arrives, you might find a little time to light a candle for someone you love.
Speak their name, remember that love does not simply disappear when a life ends.

Tonight, mine and my grandmothers’ necklaces are still resting together on my altar.