Another Year, Still Loving Through the Walls

For those of us with incarcerated loved ones, the end of the year does not arrive quietly. It announces itself with reflection, reckoning, and remembrance. It signals another year gone by without them—another year of visits measured in minutes, voices heard through phones, and love expressed across distance and steel.

Though the world invites us to be jovial about the coming New Year, many of us battle a grief that doesn’t easily lift with fireworks or resolutions. We smile when expected. We show up when required. But beneath the celebrations lives a quiet ache—one that counts not just the days ahead, but the days already lost.

At A Mother’s Cry, we know this grief intimately. We know the empty chairs at holiday tables. The milestones missed. The conversations postponed. The way hope and heartbreak often coexist in the same breath. We know what it means to believe fiercely while hurting deeply.

And yet—we endure.

We endure because love does not pause for prison walls. Because faith is not naïve; it is resilient. Because even in waiting, we are still mothers, still families, still whole human beings worthy of joy, dignity, and justice.

As this year closes and another begins, A Mother’s Cry holds space for the truth: it is possible to grieve what was lost and still believe in what is coming. We stand with every mother, every family, every loved one carrying this weight into a new year—not alone, not unseen, and not without hope.

"Happy New Year"

Rev. Jamesina E. Greene. President

A Mother's Cry