There are people who enter your life and, somehow, the shape of the world changes. Not because they stay forever; sometimes it is because they leave something behind that makes forever seem like the wrong measure of time.
Alyssa Tsagong was one of those people for me.
I have been thinking about how we remember people who die, particularly people from this strange, beautiful, brutal community that has become such an enormous part of my life. There is no shortage of grief here. We lose people we love. We lose people we admire. We lose people we have never actually met but deeply know because of the intimacy created by shared fear, shared hope, shared language. And then there are the people whose absence feels larger than the space they occupied.
Alyssa is one of those people for me.
I did not know her in all the ways I wish I had. That is one of the particular cruelties of this community: there are people whose lives touch yours deeply even when you never get enough time with them. We know pieces of one another. We see the work. We hear the words. We witness the courage. We recognize something in another person and think, Yes. You understand. And sometimes that has to be enough.
Alyssa understood something fundamental about connection. She built Temples of Kinship, and even the name feels like an representation of what she believed: that we need places, literally and figuratively, where people can gather, be known, be held, and remember that they do not have to carry everything alone.
Kinship is not always biology. Sometimes kinship is the person who answers the text. The person who sits beside you in the waiting room. The person who knows exactly what a scan result means and doesn’t make you explain why your stomach has dropped through the floor because theirs dropped with yours. The person who can hear the fear underneath your words. The person who reminds you that you are still a person, not merely a diagnosis, a collection of pathology reports and treatment plans and tumor markers.
That kind of kinship is sacred and Alyssa understood that. She didn’t just talk about connection. She created spaces for it. That matters. It matters because so much of illness is profoundly isolating. Even when surrounded by people, there are experiences that cannot be translated completely. There are fears that don’t fit neatly into conversation. There are losses that happen long before death. There are versions of ourselves that disappear quietly, without anyone else noticing.
And then someone comes along and says, in one way or another: I see you.
Sometimes that is the miracle. Maybe that is what Alyssa was building with Temples of Kinship; not simply a community, but a place where people could remember their own humanity. And now she is no longer alive because of this disease we share.
I hate that sentence.
There are certain sentences that never become easier to write. Someone died. Someone is gone. Someone who mattered is no longer physically here. We say these things because language requires nouns and verbs and endings. But grief refuses to cooperate with grammar. Grief does not understand past tense.
Alyssa still exists in the lives she touched. She exists in the people who found community because of her. She exists in the conversations she started. She exists in the work she began. She exists in the people who will carry that work forward. She exists in the memory of those who love her.
And she exists in rainbows.
I have decided that this is where I am going to let a little magic in because Alyssa told me she would visit me in rainbows after she died when she told me she’d entered hospice. I am, by nature, a fairly grounded person. I like facts. I like evidence. I like things that can be explained and categorized and understood, but grief has a way of making room for things we cannot prove. So since Alyssa told me she will be sending magic from the other side in the form of rainbows, I am going to believe it. Not because I can explain it, but because I don’t need to.
And because sometimes a rainbow appears at exactly the right moment. Sometimes the sky breaks open after a storm and suddenly there are colors where there were only clouds. Sometimes you need to believe that someone you love has found a way to say:
I’m still here.
I see you.
Keep going.
Maybe that is what rainbows are. Maybe they are physics. Maybe they are light and water and atmospheric conditions. Maybe they are a symbol of the promise God made to not flood the world again. Maybe they are Alyssa.
I don’t actually think those explanations have to be mutually exclusive. There is something beautiful about the possibility that the ordinary mechanisms of the universe can also carry extraordinary meaning.
Light enters water. The light bends. Colors separate. And suddenly something that was invisible becomes visible.
That feels like grief to me. The person is gone, but the love remains. The body is gone, but the impact remains. The voice is gone, but the words remain. The presence is gone, but the relationship keeps changing shape. The light is still there. It just looks different.
I think about the people Alyssa loved and the people who loved her. I think about the people who found themselves held by something she created. I think about Temples of Kinship and what it means to build something whose purpose is connection—to create a place where people can find one another and recognize themselves in one another.
That is legacy. Not a monument. Not a name carved into stone. A living thing. A connection that continues after the person who created it can no longer physically participate in it. That is the thing about people who love fiercely and live intentionally: they leave pieces of themselves everywhere. In us. In the work. In the community. In the language we use. In the courage we find because they showed us what courage looked like.
In the rainbows. Especially the rainbows. I don’t know for sure what happens after we die; I carry a belief system from my childhood that includes the possibility of heaven. I don’t know for sure if there is an other side. I don’t know if people can send messages through weather or light or coincidence. But I know this: there are things I cannot explain that I don’t want to explain away. So when the rain comes and the sun breaks through and colors arc across the sky, I will think of Alyssa. I will imagine her somewhere beyond all of this, sending a little bit of magic back toward us, the people she touched.
A reminder. A hello. A keep going.
And I will, because that is what we do in the MBC Community. We grieve. We remember. We carry one another. We build temples of kinship in whatever ways we can. And sometimes, when the storm finally breaks, we look up. And there she is. A little magic in the sky. Still finding us. Still connecting us. Still reminding us that love does not require a body to remain real. Sometimes it only requires light. And rain. And someone willing to look up.
More info on celebrating Alyssa: https://www.templeofkinship.org/alyssa-tsagong.
