“My friend told me this quote: ‘They say you die twice. Once when you take your last breath, and once when someone says your name for the last time.’ As long as I’m still breathing … I can keep my mom alive,” Kenya McCarthy told the New School Free Press. McCarthy, 29, based in San Diego, is a content creator who focuses on grief, healing, intentional joy, and crafting.

Kenya McCarthy has just finished her fourth upcycled cross-body bag for “28 Mothers,” a video series dedicated to giving away bags for people who have lost their moms during this Mother’s Day season. 

This is McCarthy’s first Mother’s Day without her mom, and she’s honoring her through sustainable fashion practices and connecting with others. “I feel like my motto is ‘everything we need exists, we just might have to change it,’” McCarthy said. “Upcycling makes me feel connected to my mom.”

McCarthy began creating content under @chronicallykenya in December of 2024 after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). “I started to create content to connect with other chronically ill people,” she said. In April of 2025, she lost her mobility completely and went on leave from her full-time job, which inspired McCarthy to work on growing her platform. “With my diagnosis, my mom really advocated for me that my life was not over,” McCarthy said. 

When her mom got sick, she explained, she was able to reach out and connect with her online community. In a year-and-a-half, she gained over 67,000 followers on her Instagram and TikTok combined. McCarthy produces content that is dedicated to documenting her relationship with grief; from her own MS diagnosis, and then also from the loss of her mother. 

One way McCarthy explores her grief online is through crafting and sewing: hobbies she adopted from her family. McCarthy first learned how to sew from her grandmother when she was a young girl. “My nanny cut two scraps of fabric and taught me how to make a pocket,” she said. 

Although sewing has always been her passion, she spent 11 years away from the practice after convincing herself not to pursue fashion at Parsons School of Design. “No one in my family had ever really moved away,” McCarthy said. “I remember talking myself off the ledge and was like, ‘I can just sew at home.’”

According to McCarthy, her mother, Nicole, was a multi-talented crafter and innovator. “I wouldn’t even say that my mom was just a crafter,” she said, “I would call her a tradeswoman.” After flying back to her hometown in Grottoes, Virginia to clean out her mother’s apartment after she passed in 2025, McCarthy found some left-behind epoxy resin crafts, cake decorating materials, woodworking tools and other supplies inside of five shelves and a few closets. 

“Going through my mom’s craft stuff was like being transported into her mind,” McCarthy said. “She had everything.” After making the decision to preserve her mother’s craft supplies and other belongings, McCarthy decided to repurpose the leftover materials to make memorial gifts for her mother’s close family members and friends. McCarthy made photo ornaments with buttons and gems from the extensive collection on her mother’s shelves; an elephant made from her leftover clothes for her brother; and used pieces from one of her mother’s bucket hats to make a teddy bear for her seven-year-old cousin. “There’s a video of them dancing, and my mom has this bucket hat on. So for her bear, I cut the feet out of the bucket hat. Maybe when she’s older, I can show her,” McCarthy said. 

In a video posted days after her mother died, McCarthy invited her audience to participate in the documentation of this creative healing practice on her platform. Commenters left familiar anecdotes of both the loss of  loved ones and the appreciation for McCarthy and her take on grief. “I’ve lost four family members in the last few years,” one commenter wrote, “going through their things is something that not many people consider.” Another commented, “I started upcycling furniture that I found on the streets and started painting them and giving them new life, this is what kept me actively channeling something creative and healthy in my life during my most difficult time.”

McCarthy created the video series “28 Mothers” to acknowledge people grieving during the holiday season. The series features McCarthy’s experience making 28 bags to process her grief and helps others grieving feel less alone on Mother’s Day. She told the NSFP that sewing different cross-body bags made from scraps of pillows, jeans, and other leftover items helped her restore her passion with a new perspective. “When my mom died, it really reopened this entire section of my life,” McCarthy said. “I want to give things to moms who are experiencing adversity, which is mothering without their mom.” 

Inside each bag, she adds the logo of her sustainable fashion brand, @k.carthydesigns, which McCarthy created after she began designing when she was nine. The logo McCarthy uses for her pieces came from a note left behind by her mother in a journal she found in her apartment after her death, which McCarthy says is a way to share pieces of her mother with every item that she makes. “When I’m looking for a sewing pattern, my mom is with me, and I think that is a beautiful thing,” McCarthy said. 

McCarthy aims to send out all of the 28 bags she made for her series by the end of May, as a last gift of encouragement to mothers after the Mother’s Day holiday. McCarthy plans to focus on building her platform, working towards becoming a full-time content creator, and documenting her grief journey in book form someday, merging her passions for sewing, writing, and photography.

She’ll continue to make use of her mother’s collection. “Instead of letting those things sit, if you use them, you will feel their energy,” McCarthy said. McCarthy believes that making use of what tools are left behind by those who have passed can help ease the burden of grief. “Micro-joys are how we navigate macro-grief,” she said, “I can’t control that I lost my mom. I can’t control what’s going on in my body. But I can absolutely control what I turn these blue corduroy pants into.”