When we talk about ancestor veneration, our collective mind almost instinctively drifts toward the our silver-haired elders. We picture the great-grandparents frozen in black-and-white photographs on mantelpieces, or the frail relatives who spent their final years sitting softly in wheelchairs. We treat them as pristine, static icons—sanitized of their complexity, purged of their edge, and remembered almost exclusively by their final earthly iteration.

“Pop Pop didn’t like spicy food.”

No. He loved spicy food. He had a jar of crushed hot peppers on the table for every meal and spent his twenties seeking out the hottest dishes in town. He only stopped eating it in his seventies because the heartburn eventually got to be too much.

When we reduce our ancestors to the gentle, diluted versions of their twilight years, we rob them of a bit of their realness. We do the exact same thing when we sanitize their legacies, painting over their messiness to make them fit neatly into pristine narrative boxes. To venerate our ancestors in the truest, most potent sense, we have to go beyond the intellectual walls we erect to keep the hurt away. We have to sit directly in the grief, the loud laughter, and the tear-stained reality of who they actually were when they walked this earth.

Veneration is an act of honest, heavy, full-spectrum remembrance.

Reclaiming the Youthful Ancestor

After my father’s mother passed away, I held the responsibility of designing the program and writing the obituary. As such, relatives flooded my inboxes with everything they thought would be helpful. I spent an afternoon going through all of the photographs from my dad and his siblings. For years, my memory of her had been anchored in her later years. But spread out across the table were images of a completely different era: a young, ridiculously fly, shapely woman wearing a high-updo and razor-sharp high heels, posing like she owned every single room she stepped into. She carried that same dignity and flair into her final chapter, but seeing those early photographs was a stark reminder that the vibrant, rowdy, stylish young woman didn’t vanish as she aged. She was woven directly into the fabric of who my grandmother was until the day she left us.

If we only honor the quiet elder, we miss the woman who danced, who made mistakes, who loved deeply, and who fought hard to build a life.

Holding that full humanity also means making space for their imperfections. In modern spiritual dialogue, there is often a temptation to elevate our forebears to saintly status or, conversely, to flatten them entirely by their unhealed trauma. Real ancestral reverence requires a far more nuanced lens.

When I interviewed scholar and storyteller Sara Makeba Daise for MadameNoire last year on Black women’s ancestral spirituality, she put it brilliantly:

“Grace for myself allows me to have grace for my ancestors… not ‘bit– you ain’t sh–’ or ‘you can do no wrong’—grace lets me honor my own humanity, and theirs.”

When we extend that level of grace back through our lineages, veneration can become a mirror. When we honor their messy, unfinished, deeply human journeys–without reducing them strictly to their pain–we grant ourselves permission to navigate our own living journeys with that exact same grace.

Sitting in the Taste and Texture of Grief

In the fast-paced crush of modern daily life, we rarely have the luxury to sit openly in our grief. We compartmentalize our losses out of pure survival. You cannot break down completely in the middle of a workday meeting or while navigating rush-hour traffic; the world demands that you pull yourself together, put your armor back on, and keep moving.

When the workday ends and you retreat into the privacy of your home surrounded by people who love and understand you, why keep those walls up? Why keep the hurt locked behind closed doors?

Not long ago, my partner made collard greens for dinner. When I took the first bite, the flavor profile hit me with such sudden, overwhelming accuracy that my throat tightened. They tasted nearly identical to my late grandmother Lillian’s greens. Even though she passed in 2020, it had been years before her death since she was physically able to stand in the kitchen, clean the leaves, and cook down a pot like that. Sitting at the table, I didn’t want to swallow the emotion or pretend it was just a nice meal. I wanted to crawl straight into bed and weep—not just because I missed her, but because I missed the era when her hands were strong enough to feed us all.

In that moment, it felt like a great blessing to be sharing a home with a partner who echoes my ancestors in so many subtle, everyday ways. He brings them into the room without even trying—whether through the songs we both love, or in the uncanny coincidence that his maternal grandmother and my late Grandma Wanda shared the exact same nickname, “Doll Baby,” right down to the same punny jokes they’d crack about it.

Even his presence carries a familiar, comforting history. His skin tone, draped in gold chains, immediately calls to mind those long-gone neighborhood guys from back on the block—the ones who always spoke, looked out for the kids, and slipped kids a five-dollar bill for lunch on field trip days. It’s not just an aesthetic similarity. He has the exact same heart.

The realization brings to mind that moment during the Resurrection narrative when Jesus explains that he has to go, but promises to send a comforter—one who will remind us of everything we were taught. I’m not likening my partner to the Holy Spirit, but I recognize how the Holy Spirit works through him to offer comfort. He becomes the instrument through which I am gently reminded of my people. Through the meals he cooks, the jokes we share, and the music playing in our living room, those small, sacred details surface to reassure me that my life was lovingly shaped by their influence, and that their presence hasn’t left me at all.

Allowing yourself to feel that sharp, unvarnished weight is the price of deep love. The sensory triggers—a specific seasoning, a familiar chord progression, the smell of perfume on an old coat—are portals. When we let them wash over us instead of ducking for cover, we let our people back into the room.

When Our Friends Become the Ancestors

There is another silent mistake we make in conversations about lineage: assuming that ancestors only belong to generations long gone.

As a Class of 2006 graduate reflecting on the twenty-year horizon of adulthood, the passage of time takes on a very distinct weight. You look back at who you were at seventeen, measure it against who you have become, and realize with striking clarity that the human journey is not an infinite runway. We lose elders, yes—but we also lose our peers. When our friends pass on, they become our ancestors, too.

Peer ancestry hits in a completely different register because these are the people who walked through the exact same cultural eras, listened to the same radio rotations, and navigated the same life stages alongside us.

My homegirl Genelle from high school has been gone for a little over a year now. I spoke with her a few weeks before she passed, but our last full-length, deep-dive catchup was over a Zoom call in 2023. We spent that call doing what we always did: talking about our careers in communications/media, sharing updates about our kids, and laughing about old times. During that conversation, she gave me a list of local babysitter recommendations for the exact geographic area where I live right now—an area I hadn’t even moved to back then.

Navigating my daily life today using practical, hyper-local advice left behind by someone who is no longer here on earth feels eerie, but in the absolute best way. It is so inherently Genelle. Even that 2023 virtual coffee date had been sparked by her reaching out to help me with a career win. She was always looking out, always dropping gems, always extending a hand.

Music was the anchor that connected us from the very beginning. We were obsessed with neo-soul, conscious rap, funky instrumentals, and tracks built on old-school soul samples. In the eleventh grade, when John Legend released his debut album, Get Lifted, Genelle and I wore that CD out. Or rather, she wore out her copy, and I wore out the copy she burned for me on her computer. Putting that album on is a portal back to two young Black girls sitting in an era of boundless potential, completely unaware of how fast the years would move, yet pouring into each other in ways that still sustain me today.

From Solitude to the Shared Kickback

Having young ancestors is an undeniable reminder that none of us are invincible. It’s a lesson I probably learned too early in life. We do not get to stay in these physical bodies forever. We are all inching steadily toward the end of our own human journeys, which means the time we have right now matters immensely. We have work to finish, people to touch, stories to tell, and a world to impact before our turn is up.

When you hold that truth alone, the weight can feel crushing. However, when you share that space of remembrance with others, the heavy atmosphere shifts.

Recently, my partner and I spent an evening dedicated entirely to remembering our people. There was emphasis put on the friends we’ve lost along the way. We didn’t sit in solemn, stifling silence around a quiet room. We turned up the speakers and played their favorite tracks. We played the songs that made them dance, the artists they swore by, the beats that defined their youth. As some of our memories overlapped, the room didn’t feel like a heavy mourning session or a gloomy vigil. It felt like a little kickback. It felt alive.

The Call to Remember

For me, veneration can’t be locking memories away in velvet boxes or speaking about them only in hushed, reverent whispers that strip away their fire. I honor them by remembering the fullness of their lived experiences—the songs they blasted, the foods they craved before their bodies gave out, the mistakes they made, the grace they earned, and the love they left behind.

Whenever you find yourself back in the safety of your own home tonight, drop the armor. Put down the walls you’ve built to keep life moving and the hurt at bay. Turn on the playlist that reminds you of the friend who didn’t make it to this decade. Cook the meal that tastes like your grandmother’s food. Look at the old photos of your elders when they were young, fly, and wild. Give yourself the space to sit in the tears, the laughter, and the heavy, beautiful weight of remembering them as they truly were.