My grandma is the oldest of five siblings from a small, poor town in West Texas. She was the first and only one of her siblings to graduate from college in 1957 with a degree in nursing from Prairie View A&M University (PV), a historically black college in _ Texas. PV was one of the only schools she could attend during the segregated Jim Crow Era. I think of and appreciate my grandmother as a trailblazer. Not only did she have a successful career as a nurse, but she was also the first African American tenured professor at Texas Women's University and she established her own home health care business in Houston, Texas that still successfully operates to this day.

On the other hand, my papa was the second oldest of five siblings and similarly to my grandmother, the only one of his siblings to graduate from college. My grandpa worked as a full-time orderly at a segregated hospital in Houston to pay for his tuition at the historically black university, Texas Southern University. It's funny how life works because during my papa's time at the hospital is where he met and fell in love with my grandmother where she was working as a nurse. He graduated from Texas Southern with a Bachelor's in English in 1965. Since I was born, I had always known my papa to be retired, but before that, he was a well-known educator and principal in the Houston Independent School District.

Last semester, my family lost our beloved Chester Smith. Before this, I had been fortunate enough not to have dealt with very much loss. There is certainly never a right time to lose a loved one, but I definitely never expected it to happen during my first semester of law school, let alone, my first month. To be frank, the most frustrating part of losing my grandpa was the fact that I was in law school. During this time, I realized that I could never press "pause" on my life. I still had school, I still had readings, I still had cold calls, and I was over 2,500 miles away from my family. It being so early in the semester I did not really have friends I could lean on, and Columbia offers very little support for grief. The only advice I was given from student services was to email my professors to notify them. Never being allowed to press pause on life during that time took a toll on me, and my grades definitely suffered because of it. The frustrating thing about that is the over emphasis on grades in this space in the first place because grades never tell the full story. They will certainly never be able to tell any interviewer that I spent majority of my first semester grieving one of the most important people in my life.

Yes, it is good to pay respect to ancestors. They have passed along to us all of life's joys while taking on its worst harms, and while suffering great losses have bequeathed to us immensely valuable victories.

Honoring ancestors means striving for our future as they did for theirs. So the next draft should pivot from them to you, and from the past to the future. What is the best plan you can envision now for the creation of a new layer of legacy for those who come after?