Headlamp in the Dark

What do you do when the person who always came running is the one person you can never call again?
For thirty-six years, Chasity had an answer to every hard moment life threw at her, and that answer was her big sister Tonya. Eleven years older and a lifetime ahead, Tonya was the kind of woman who defied every expectation and ignored every limit placed on her. She left school at sixteen, became a mother at seventeen, survived a wreck that should have broken her, beat the odds more times than anyone could count, and kept moving through all of it like the world owed her nothing and she intended to take everything anyway. She worked harder than anyone twice her size, scaled three-story ladders with a paintbrush and pure stubbornness, cut her own cast off with her own tools, and built a life with her bare hands in the woods of northwest Alabama — all while somehow still managing to show up for every single person she loved, every single time they needed her.
She baked cakes at midnight. She drove like an absolute maniac. She wore a headlamp in the dark so she wouldn't wake anyone up, and she texted her little sister every single day without fail — just to say I love you sister.
Growing up in the shadow of a woman like that shapes you in ways you don't fully understand until she's gone. Raised together on Hawk Pride Mountain Road in Tuscumbia Alabama, bound by these two sisters built a lifetime of showing up for each other. Through pregnancies and heartbreak, factory floors and hospital rooms, dark seasons and the kind of laughter that leaves your stomach aching at two in the morning over crane flies and canvas truck covers — they were always, always there.
And then, in October of 2025, the mountain went quiet in a way it had never gone quiet before.

Headlamp in the Dark is a memoir about an extraordinary woman told by the little sister who loved her most. It is a story about the kind of bond that doesn't require explanation, the kind of grief that doesn't follow a timeline, and the slow, stubborn work of learning to stand in the open when the safest place you ever knew is suddenly, impossibly gone.
She always said she'd sleep when she died. Until then, she didn't stop for a single second.