Remembering Shay Youngblood

by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Shay Youngblood taught us to find our mamas everywhere. And so I found Shay. First in Black Girl in Paris and then, unbelievably, right in front of my teenage eyes at Charis Books and More’s Charis Circle Young Women Writers Group. Thank you to Linda Bryant for sharing the wealth of your friendship with Shay with us. Shay was very matter of fact about the reality that we could go anywhere, do everything, and feel at home in the world, even if we never forgot that we had lost everything.

This is what I refuse to lose now that Shay has come home to the infinite. For me, Shay is in a writing studio in a garage, filled with typewriter altars, and she’s preparing to go to Japan. Shay, regal in a bodega getting ready to speak at New York University. Shay, crossing legs to make a table for a book, a question, a plate of food. Shay on the phone describing the elaborate ingredients for her elaborate meals. Shay, sitting on the back porch with Annette, while I dance barefoot in their yard, touching my own head, touching my heart, touching the Earth in gratitude. Shay’s wit in Laurie Carlos’s mouth in The Talking Bones: “You must be hungry, sweetheart. Can I get you something to read?” Shay, just a few months ago on Zoom, giving my sister and I advice on how to tell a story of sistering that could reach all ages. It only now occurs to me that we didn’t tell you, Shay, about our trip to Paris together.

Shay created worlds that people leapt to embody on stage, to translate into their mother tongues, to immortalize in murals, to beam light through, and to film. Even before she surrendered the form of this body, she was not limited by form. She took all of them, and she infused them with curiosity, care, and love.

Thank you, Daniel Alexander Jones and Kelley Alexander, for sharing my message of gratitude and love with Shay while she could still hear it. Thank you to Shay’s care team for making sure that she was surrounded in love, tenderness, and queer family as she artfully let go.

Oh, Shay, you made a whole universe of love out of losing your mother at a young age. You decided the love you sought was possible and present everywhere. You showed us again and again that loss is not the opposite of abundance; it’s the prompt that pushes us to be more creatively present to all that we have.

What will our community become by losing you, Shay? May we become our most abundant mothering yet. May we be unafraid to be huge and inventive. May we remember we belong everywhere. More creative than we have ever been. Just to meet you where you are.

See also: