Kimaya Diggs wants you to ask her about her mother. One thing Kimaya can tell you about her is that before she died, Kimaya decided to take a pottery class, which her mother asked to join in on. She was incredibly prolific: she created around 300 pieces, but didn't like to glaze her work as much as she liked throwing pots. So when she died, she left behind around 60 unglazed pieces that the owner of the studio was nice enough to keep so that Kimaya could glaze them herself and the studio even named a color of glaze after Kimaya's mom.

Kimaya's mom grappled with cancer for 12 years and she decided not to tell most people in her life that she had cancer, which was difficult for Kimaya to grapple with. When she found out, she was 16, and her younger sisters were 14 and 10. She immediately started making contingency plans, figuring out when her sister's annual physicals were, getting a driver's license as early as possible in case she would need to drive them to school. Kimaya is a songwriter, and her first album, which came out before her mother died, was about grieving her mother, though she had to sing about it in vague terms.

Kimaya had been curious about death from a young age: when she was a child, she would write her will in her school composition notebooks, causing some alarm to her parents. She feels that in a lot of ways she has had an easier time of thinking about her own mortality than her mom did.

She writes about her mom a lot nowadays, writing out conversations she never had with her mom as if they were scenes from a play. She struggles with the temptation to write what she herself wishes her mom would have said in these conversations compared to what she thinks her mom would have said in reality.

She also wishes that more people would have been supportive to her partner in grief, who she has been together with for 9 years. In many ways, he was grieving his own loss just as much as she was, but she was the only one who got the cards and offers of support from friends and family, and she wasn't as able to support him while he was grieving. She hopes that in the future, offering support to everyone affected by a death, even if it seems like they would not be as obviously affected, will be far more normalized.

Kimaya knows her grief will be with her for the rest of her life, and will always do that wack thing where it suddenly and unexpectedly gets super heavy on some days, but at least now she feels like she has a better handle on what she is dealing with.

Links:
Kimaya's website: https://www.kimayadiggs.com/
Kimaya's Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/kimayadiggs/?hl=en

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

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