Still fighting like a Mother

There are versions of ourselves we never imagine we will have to become.

I never imagined becoming the mother who had to bury her child.

I never imagined learning how to stand in front of people, speak about justice, fight for communities, answer phone calls, help families, lead an organization, finish a PhD, raise my children, and keep moving while carrying a grief so heavy that some days simply getting out of bed felt like an act of resistance.

But here I am.

Still here.

Not untouched. Not unbroken. Not the same.

But here.

Before Grief Had His Name

Years ago, I wrote about what it meant to fight like a mother. At the time, I was writing about my son Keelan, what he was going through and how fighting for him resembled my fight for my community.

He was 17 when he had his first seizure while driving with his little brother in the car. I remember the fear of those days. The ambulance. The hospital. The machines. The tests. The questions doctors couldn’t answer. I remember watching my child lying there and wanting somebody, anybody, to tell me why. I did what mothers do.

I asked questions.

I challenged answers that didn’t make sense.

I researched.

I advocated.

I stayed beside him.

And I fought.

I connected that experience to the environmental justice work I was already doing because I understood something very clearly: our children’s bodies do not exist separately from their environments.

The air they breathe matters.

The water they drink matters.

The communities they grow up in matter.

The systems surrounding them matter.

At the time, I thought I understood what it meant to be afraid of losing a child. I didn’t know that one day I would actually lose him.

Then December 16, 2025 Came

Keelan was 19 years old when he died.

There is no sentence after that one that can make it make sense. There is no organizing framework for burying your child. There is no strategic plan for waking up and remembering all over again that he is gone. There is no degree that teaches you how to survive it.

No fellowship.

No title.

No award.

No amount of community recognition prepares a mother for the silence left behind by her son’s absence.

In May of that year, Keelan had undergone brain surgery. In August, he experienced a blood clot. We had already spent years navigating seizures, doctors, hospitals, medications, fear, hope, and uncertainty.

And then, on December 16, I lost my baby. I had already known grief. I had a still born baby, my son, Klarence, in 2015. In January 2025, my children’s father died. Then, before that year could even end, Keelan was gone too. There are seasons when loss doesn’t knock politely at the door. It kicks it in.

And 2025 took things from me that I can never replace.

And Yet, the World Kept Moving

That may be one of the cruelest things about grief.

The world doesn’t stop when yours does.

Bills still come.

Children still need their mother.

Emails still arrive.

People still need help.

Communities still experience disasters.

Corporations still seek permits.

Polluting industries still expand.

Families still need food.

Mothers still need assistance with their light bills.

Children still need shoes and backpacks.

Communities still deserve clean air and water.

And somehow, I had to learn how to hold two truths at the same time:

I was devastated.

And…

I still cared deeply about what happened to other people.

That surprised me.

Grief did not take away my love for community.

If anything, it made that love more tender. I know what it means to need somebody. I know what it means for life to change in an instant. I know what it means to receive a phone call you never wanted. I know what it means to sit beside a hospital bed praying for answers.

I know what it means to smile because your other children are watching you while a part of you is screaming inside. I know what it means to be called “strong” when you don’t want to be strong anymore.

And because I know those things, I cannot look away from someone else’s suffering. I know what it’s like to not want to be resilient.

I Have Complicated Feelings About the Word Resilient

People call Black women resilient all the time.

Strong.

Powerful.

Unstoppable.

And yes, we are many of those things. But sometimes “resilient” becomes a convenient word people use so they don’t have to ask why we are constantly required to survive so much. I don’t want Black women to only be celebrated for how much pain we can carry.

I don’t want mothers to have to become superheroes just to keep their children safe. I don’t want frontline communities praised for their resilience while corporations continue polluting their neighborhoods.

I don’t want families applauded for surviving hurricanes when we could build systems that help them thrive before, during, and after disasters.

I don’t want mutual aid to become an excuse for government neglect. Our communities deserve more than survival.

We deserve softness, safety, health, joy, rest, resources and the opportunity to live full lives.

So do I.

That has been one of the hardest lessons of this chapter. The woman fighting for everybody else is also a human being.

She gets tired.

She cries.

She needs help.

She needs rest.

She needs somewhere safe to put down the armor.

Sometimes the strongest thing she can say is, “Today, I don’t have it.”

I Finished Anyway

In May 2026, just months after losing Keelan, I successfully defended my dissertation.

I became Dr. Roishetta Sibley Ozane.

My research examined the impact of policing on the mental health of Black communities. Fear, anxiety, depression, chronic stress, racial profiling, overpolicing, use of force and the psychological consequences of living in communities where the people entrusted with protecting you can also become a source of fear. That work was never just academic to me.

Neither is environmental justice.

Neither is mutual aid.

Neither is community organizing.

I have never had the privilege of studying injustice from a safe distance. I have lived close to the things I fight. I am raising children in the communities I fight for. I breathe the air I talk about. I drive past the facilities. I see the flares. I know the families.

I know what hurricanes do after the cameras leave.

I know what poverty looks like when the refrigerator is empty. I know what grief looks like when everyone expects you to return to normal.

My scholarship has a heartbeat because my life is inside of it. So when I became “Dr.,” I didn’t suddenly become someone new. I became a fuller version of the woman who had already been doing this work.

The mother.

The Black woman from Ruleville, Mississippi.

The woman who built something out of what was available.

The organizer.

The researcher.

The troublemaker when trouble needs to be made.

The mother who has buried children.

The woman who has had her heart broken and still believes communities are worth fighting for.

All of her earned that degree. My children are apart of that story. Keondrea, Kristian, Kami, Kamea, Kash and Keelan. Klarence is apart of that story too. So is my grandbaby Kingston.

So here I am, just 8 months after the most devastating loss of my life, still fighting, still striving, still telling my story because that’s what we do as women, as Black women, as mothers. We keep fighting, we keep going with little respect, without enough pay, without rest. We keep making the world better, not for us, but for our children. Here’s to this next chapter. When we fight, we win.