Ashley Sykes, 26, told her mom she was going upstairs to lie down.

Her mom, Carla Jacks-Simms, 55, decided to check on her after several hours. She worried about her eldest daughter, who had struggled with Type 1 diabetes for most of her life.

Jacks-Simms discovered Sykes’ lifeless body in her bed. A diabetic coma had killed her.

That was in 2016. Jacks-Simms keeps her daughter’s ashes in an urn on a shelf in the front room of the house she’s lived in for the past 20 years.

“I guard it with my life,” she said.

She raised seven children on the first floor of this two-family flat in north St. Louis. Another of her daughters, and her own five young children, moved in next door. Jacks-Simms makes sure her grandkids get to the bus stop in the morning and home from school when their mom is at work.

On May 16, a mile-long EF3 tornado struck St. Louis. When Jacks-Simms' home lost power and she heard a window break, she ran to the basement to take shelter.

When she came out, her street looked like a scene from a horror movie. The house across the street from her was now a pile of rubble.

“Oh my (expletive) God!” she screamed. “I know people live there! Where are they?!” Everyone was yelling and trying to find each other. The roof from her next-door neighbor’s house was torn off and had crushed the truck parked in front of her home. Powerful winds blew out the windows in her house. Glass and debris filled the rooms.

The streets were littered with downed power lines, poles and large trees.

“It felt like a bomb had been dropped, and we didn’t win,” she said. “I really feel for those in war-torn countries now.”

She thanked God that her neighbors had not been home when their house collapsed. Another neighbor, who used to walk up and down the street daily, was found dead in his home.

When Jacks-Simms' daughter got home from work, they started walking through the unpassable street to try to get to her children, who had been stuck on school buses for hours. They didn't have power, gas or water for days. Young men in the neighborhood started clearing out the trees blocking the road. Her family boarded up their own broken windows.

“Who else was going to help us?” she said.

The first few nights, she stayed outside on the porch, guarding whatever might be salvageable in the house. She’s never had renter’s insurance, and had to throw away all the food in the fridge. She’s been getting by on hot dogs handed out by volunteers in the area. She needs someone to haul away her soaked mattresses, ruined furniture and clothing.

“I worked so hard for my little stuff,” she said.

She works as a caregiver, even though she’s recovering from major surgery herself after a car accident in December. But she hasn’t been able to work since the storm damaged her home.

Jacks-Simms often sits on her porch, counting her blessings and thanking the Lord. Sometimes she goes inside the house and takes naps on a chair. She doesn’t want to leave Lucy, her beloved Chihuahua, behind, and is looking for a place to stay where her dog would be welcomed.

Four days after the tornado, when another dangerous storm rolled in, she relented and stayed the night at a friend’s house. That night, part of her roof collapsed, and water collected in the rooms.

She knows she will have to find somewhere to stay while her landlord repairs the house. She and her displaced neighbors lack so many resources. She needs help finding affordable housing, money for a deposit, furniture, clothing, toiletries and pet supplies.

Even Lucy’s doggie bed got water-damaged.

The thing that’s been bothering her, she said, is the people driving by to film content and take photos for their social media accounts.

“We don’t want to be on your TikToks,” she said. “We’re just sitting here protecting our stuff.”

Come help remove debris from the street, she said. But don’t come gawk at their misery.

Jacks-Simms has already dealt with her biggest losses: her daughter’s death in 2016, then her father's death three years ago. She will find a way forward again.

Her motto remains, “Everything’s going to be OK. We’re going to be where we need to be.” And her faith in God sustains her.

For proof, she looks no further than her living room.

In a home shaken and fractured by two powerful storms, her daughter’s urn stood untouched.

When we dropped off our daughter at the airport in January for her semester abroad in Paris, I took a picture as she walked through the TSA security line, and my heart felt caught in my throat.

We would be separated by an ocean and 4,000-plus miles for more than four months -- our longest stretch of time apart since she was born.

I was excited for her to go on this adventure. Living independently in a foreign country teaches a young person so many life skills, along with broadening one’s perspective and understanding of the world. When I was a college student nearly 30 years ago, I benefited enormously from my own semester abroad in Egypt. I wanted my daughter to gain the same kind of confidence I felt when I realized I could thrive in a place completely unfamiliar and far from home.

At the same time, I was more anxious about her being so far away than I cared to admit. Each milestone of raising children to self-sufficient adulthood requires more letting go. As parents, we nudge our children outside their comfort zones, as we are pushed outside our own.

The world -- and how we raise children in it -- has changed radically over the past three decades. When my parents waited for me to board my flight to Cairo from Houston, they knew they'd have no way of contacting me once I left. I would have to navigate a couple of flight transfers over more than 20 hours of travel, figure out how to get to my dorm, buy an international calling card, find a pay phone and let them know I had landed.

My university did not have an official program where I was headed, but I was determined to study the history and politics of the Middle East. I enrolled as a student at the American University in Cairo. We did not know a soul in Egypt. I did not speak Arabic. But like so many Gen Xers, I assumed I would figure it out along the way.

Meanwhile, my daughter had studied French for nine years before leaving. We had given her the names of several local contacts in Paris. Technology allowed us to Facetime or text her at any moment. She had access to our credit cards; in contrast, I had only a few hundred dollars to my name when I was abroad.

Why did my immigrant parents have more courage sending their 20-year-old daughter off into the world than I did? Perhaps their own experiences as young adults leaving everything and everyone behind and flying across the world to start new lives gave them that resilience and perspective. A generation prior to that, their own parents had fled India in far more precarious circumstances during Partition to start over in a brand-new country: Pakistan.

Studying abroad is a luxury; fleeing a country is survival.

My parents relied mostly on letters to stay in touch with their families when they first came to America. The promise of a weekly phone call from their daughter was an improvement from aerograms. Plus, my generation grew up with more responsibility and less hands-on parental involvement. Expectations for parents have evolved in ways that have made our children more reliant on us and us more involved in the details of their lives.

I called my mom after dropping my daughter at the airport and asked her how she'd handled the months apart and so little contact. She told me that as we were sitting at the gate at the Houston airport when boarding began, I had said to her, “Why did you let me do this? I’m scared.”

“Like we could stop you from something you had set your mind to do,” she said.

As much as times have changed, there were some parallels between the unexpected hurdles my daughter and I both faced while studying abroad. I developed bronchitis and felt clueless navigating the Egyptian medical system. My daughter’s iPhone was snatched from her hand outside a train stop. I was overly ambitious in my course selection, taking too many classes in Arabic. The airline lost our daughter’s luggage for days after she landed.

We both learned to figure it out.

Our daughter became fluent enough in French to give a presentation on a sustainable development project to a local city council member. I learned enough Arabic to hail a cab, ride the bus and order food from any cafe.

In our respective cities, we spent days visiting museums, absorbing the art and history surrounding us, talking to strangers, eating unfamiliar and delicious meals and immersing ourselves in a different way of living. Unlike life in the American suburbs, in Paris and Cairo we were surrounded by stunning architecture and masses of humanity.

At the airport, I recalled the confidence and ease with which my parents sent me off.

I did my best to follow their lead.

All of Lee Hawkins’ dreams were coming true when the nightmares started.

He was achieving many of the professional goals he had set for himself. He was an award-winning journalist with a coveted reporting job at The Wall Street Journal.

But despite all his success, "My spirit revolted," he said.

That revolt, now 20 years ago, turned out to be post-traumatic stress disorder from years of severe physical punishment suffered at the hands of his parents. In processing that trauma, Hawkins told his parents that if they wanted to maintain a relationship with him, they had to talk to a therapist with him and confront what had happened.

When they agreed to a meeting, he was terrified that his experiences would be minimized -- or worse, denied.

In a searing new memoir, “I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free,” Hawkins details the trauma he endured throughout his childhood and adolescence with excruciating honesty. Dealing with his childhood pain eventually led him to explore his family’s ancestral history in America -- deeply marked by the violence of enslavement, Jim Crow segregation and systemic racism.

While he reveals his own compelling journey, he also makes a provocative argument: The belt used by some Black parents to beat their children into obedience is an extension of the enslaver’s whip used to beat their enslaved ancestors. He makes a direct connection between the generational trauma of slavery and racial violence and the violence replicated within some Black families.

His mission is to get people to think about raising their children differently, and to help adults who grew up with normalized corporal punishment understand their experiences differently.

He knows he is an anomaly within his community for questioning his parents’ methods.

“That I’m having trouble with the fact that I was beaten as a child is a radical concept in America,” he said. For hundreds of years, white supremacists believed the only way to control Black bodies was through inflicting violence on them. Generations of white people mercilessly beat freed and enslaved Black people. It eventually trickled down to a normalization of corporal punishment and the belief that Black children “are not smart enough to be talked to” to have their behavior corrected, he said.

Hawkins argues that Black parents who whip or hit their children are acting on the ingrained beliefs of white supremacy and racist stereotypes.

Many of his contemporaries who were consistently beaten as children struggle to identify that treatment as abuse, he says. One big hurdle is having to classify one's parents' actions as abusive, especially when those actions are an accepted part of one's culture. It took years for Hawkins to understand that both things could be true -- that he loves his parents and that their actions were profoundly damaging.

“The hardest part of writing this book was capturing the balance,” he said. “I want readers to understand the love I had for my parents and the love my father felt for me -- despite the violence.”

Hawkins knew he wanted to maintain a relationship with his parents -- one based on mutual respect. Years of researching his family history, and also talking to a therapist, gave him a better understanding of his parents’ actions and a path to healing from the damage.

It also ignited a desire for him to change a culture in which corporal punishment is seen as an act of love rather than an act of violence.

“I am speaking out against something that really isn’t a big deal to a lot of people in this country,” he said. He explains the impact that adverse childhood experiences have on a person's health and lifespan, including increasing the risks of cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

“At the time, I did not believe what was happening was severe. I was one of many who was getting beaten,” he said. The journey to understanding his family, investigating their histories and healing himself led to this raw, vulnerable and important work. It offers a roadmap for those who grew up in similar conditions to have difficult conversations -- beginning with themselves.

“It may be the first time many people sit down and look at what we do to our children,” he said.