After the Red Walk

September 16, 2026

What We Carried Together

There was a moment before we started walking when I looked around and realized that everyone was genuinely happy to be there.

Not simply present. Not there because they had said they would come.

Happy to be part of something that meant something.

There was energy everywhere. People were talking and laughing. Red shirts moved through the park. Children were there. Families were there. Friends were there. People arrived ready to walk, but they also arrived ready to participate in whatever the morning was asking of us.

I had spent months thinking about The Red Walk in pieces.

Registration. Shirts. Candles. Water. Where we would meet. Where everyone would park. What people needed to know before they arrived. How we could create something centered on sickle cell awareness that felt intentional without losing the intimacy of why it existed in the first place.

Then September 12 came, and all of those pieces became people.

And that changed everything.

Most of us were walking in support of my mother, Needra, who has lived with sickle cell disease for most of her life. I knew what that meant to me. What I wasn't prepared for was what it would feel like to see other people physically show up and carry that support alongside us.

Something deeply personal had become communal.

There is a particular kind of love in people making room for what matters to you.

They didn't need to know every detail of my mother's experience with sickle cell disease. They didn't need to understand every hospital visit, every complication, every way an illness can become woven into the history of a family. They only needed to understand that this mattered.

And they came.

They put on red.

They walked.

They brought their energy, their families, their encouragement and their joy.

I think that joy is what I will remember most

Sickle cell disease carries enough heaviness of its own. The Red Walk didn't ignore that. Awareness requires us to tell the truth about the disease and the people whose lives are shaped by it. But for one morning, support didn't have to look solemn to be sincere.

It looked like people laughing together in a park.

It looked like movement.

It looked like community.

It looked like my mother being surrounded by people who had chosen to show up.

And it meant so much to her.

It meant so much to me, too.

September in The Living Room has been about inheritance—what is handed to us, what remains with us, and what we choose to carry forward. I hadn't fully considered The Red Walk as part of that conversation when I first imagined it. But standing there Saturday morning, I could see it clearly.

We inherit stories that deserve to be told.

We inherit experiences that ask something of us.

Sometimes what we do with what we've inherited is simply refuse to let it remain invisible.

The Red Walk was one small way of doing that.

We walked for awareness. We walked in support of my mother. We walked for the people living with sickle cell disease whose names we may never know. And somewhere between the first arrival and the last goodbye, the thing I had been planning stopped belonging only to me.

We carried it together.

That may be the part I am most grateful for.

Not simply that people came.

That they understood there was something worth coming for.