What Remains, Is This
Legacy, Loss, and Living
I used to believe I would build a family.
Not because I felt it in my bones, but because that’s what legacy looked like in every picture I was given. A child bearing a name. A name bearing a story. And that story surviving you. It was legacy as lineage, an unspoken expectation tied to continuation.
But I never felt tethered to the idea of pregnancy. I was drawn instead to permanence. To anchoring. To the ache of mattering. I dreamed of adoption. I built futures with partners who said yes until life rerouted, timelines splintered, and the shape of my story shifted without asking. Some of those dreams never made it to daylight. Others live quietly in memories and private ache. There are traces of me in the stories of people I helped raise, guide, feed, shelter. No titles. Just the unspoken work of shaping in the shadows.
Some roles are too sacred to name. Some truths lie too deeply within the body to be explained. And so, I learned to hold them—these unnamed connections, these almost-motherhoods that taught me love doesn't always get to claim its territory. But the longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve realized that legacy—real legacy—isn’t something I will pass down.
It is something I will have to reclaim.
Last year, my father’s last living sibling told me something I’d never known: their great-grandfather, my great-great-grandfather, was a writer. A Black man who wrote sermons and speeches for churches in his time, often without credit, because the Church—then and now—has always known how to steal from Blackness while hiding behind hallowed walls. He wrote under others’ names, gave language to visions he could never build, while they wore his words like robes and called it righteousness—sanctified exploitation wrapped in white collars and pulpits where his praise became their property.
This revelation didn't just give me a history; it gave me permission to see that the words have always been here, moving through our bloodline like an underground river, waiting for someone who could bring them to the surface.
He ghostwrote because he had to. I ghostwrite because I choose to. The same gift that lived in him lives in me, but now—for the first time in our lineage—it carries our name.
My father was also a writer, as was his sister, but they didn’t have the privilege of making it a profession. They wrote because that’s what writers do—they wrote without an audience and without a blueprint, just scraps of paper and the quiet conviction that words mattered, even when no one was listening.
Now, here I remain:
The first in our line to be paid to write, the first with a byline, the first to copyright her words, the first to own a company built from stories. I write for churches, too—sometimes with credit, sometimes without. Not because I’m hidden, but because that’s the role I choose. And maybe that’s the legacy: not just telling the truth, but owning where it leads.
Legacy is strange like that. It loops and haunts, showing up in your calling even when you weren’t looking for it. And when I feel like I’ve lost the thread, I remember that this gift didn’t start with me; it was waiting for me to finish it.
Still, I would never call this something sweet. At least, I’ve never known it that way.
There’s nothing sweet about being the last living daughter in a line you hoped to extend. There’s nothing soft about watching a name disappear. My sister died in 2011, and when my father followed six years later, I found myself holding the weight of being not just the survivor, but what felt like the end point—no children to carry this name forward, no nieces or nephews to inherit the stories I've been gathering. My family tree is withering in many ways, and blooming in other places no one will ever document.
And even when I am building something good, something lasting, there is this persistent question: Will it remain? This is what grief does. It makes you question whether the stories you leave behind will be enough to hold your name. It blurs the line between what you’ve created and what will be carried. And sometimes the heartbreak isn’t for what’s gone, but for what never was.
It’s not just childlessness. It’s a reimagining of legacy that no one prepares you for.
I think a lot about what it means to be the last and the only. The last and only remaining daughter, the last grandchild with no descendants, the one building something that might not outlive her. But I also think about what it means to be the first. The first to name the generational grief, the first to lay down the shame and pick up a softer kind of strength, the first to write her name in ink when so many before her were erased.
If story is seed,
then I am soil and sustenance.
I am the place where the silence breaks.
I am the reckoning and the reclamation.
If the line ends here, so be it,
but let the story stretch further
than I ever could.
Because here is what I know: I am not only what I build. I am what has survived. I am the culmination of a story told in the margins—written by ancestors who wrote without credit, lived without inheritance, and prayed without proof. I am what remains of my mother’s nuclear family, but I am not alone in her lineage. I carry her mother’s focus and independence. Her mother’s mother’s conviction and quick wit. I am the echo of their existence —their resilience, their laughter, their silence, their rage.
I am not the branch. I am the root made visible. I am the inheritance.
My name also bears that reminder. My middle name is Jerlynn, a blend of Jerome and Linda. My name is a merging, a memory, and a map.
My dad, Jerome, reveled in his brown skin. He raised me to do the same. He taught me how to guard my crown, how to trust my words, how to be soft without surrendering my spine. He chased justice even when it didn’t chase him back. And in doing so, he handed me something more precious than generational wealth. He handed me myself.
I can still hear him:
“You’re not just a good writer, Danielle. Your power exists in more than just your words.”
He was right. Because even when the poetry runs out, I still find a way to make language of my life. Even when the bloodline ends, the story doesn’t.
After all, I shape lives for a living. Quietly. In boardrooms. In blank pages. In the way a stepchild graduates, and I remember the parts of myself I gave. In the frameworks that prioritize transparency over trends. In the moments when someone reads my words and feels seen for the first time. I have midwifed other people’s stories into existence. I’ve held space for transformations I never got to witness. I’ve built containers for memory and matter that didn’t belong to me, but passed through me anyway. That’s not content. That’s not just storytelling.
That, too, is legacy.
I can’t write a “but God” that erases what was never given, and this is certainly not a call to find meaning in everything. Some losses are just losses. Some days, holding faith feels too heavy. But even then—even then—I want to believe there is a holy legacy in what remains.
The ways I keep showing up.
In the questions I refuse to stop asking.
The people I’ve loved well.
The things I’ve restored from ruin.
In the way I sit with other people’s grief and don’t try to heal it.
The fragile courage it takes to still dream well past my youth.
Even now.
Even here.
So, while I may not be able to measure my life by lineage, I can measure it by what I reclaimed.
By who I became when the things I once desperately craved outgrew me. By the stories I dared to write down, even when the world called them too complicated, too Black, too queer, too Christian, too intersected, too much, too little, too me.
Because what I’m building is a legacy for anyone who has tried to turn grief into grounding. For those who may not know how to carry the title but still carry the weight. For creators who build without credit, but with care. For the people who don’t always know how to hope or trust or heal—but still know how to tell.
Telling, too, is a form of continuing. Story is not just art. It is architecture.
And everyone is building something. Even in the muted moments. Even in the sorrow. Especially in the loss.
I write because this world will inherit my language that lives on without me. My cadence. My seeking. My liberation. My longing.
The things I’ve fought to believe, and the truths that finally believed in me back.
And what remains, is this:
I am not the end of the line,
I am the turning point.
The unburying, and,
the becoming.
I am the legacy I thought I’d lost.
If you're in a season of building, you might resonate with The Unscripted Faith — a 7-day devotional I created for the unfinished, the unsure, and the ones still holding on. You can read the full reflection and access the devotional on Substack here →
