Culture & Community | Arts & Culture | Newhallville | Grief
Top: Sharnay Robinson and her daughter, Mia, with Elizabeth Robinson. Before the city officially added a street sign memorializing Camryn "Mooka" Gayle, Robinson had one made that she could pull out at block parties and birthday celebrations. Bottom: Some of "Camryn's Candles." Lucy Gellman Photos.
On what would have been her daughter Camryn's 22nd birthday, Elizabeth Robinson walked out to the corner of Sherman Avenue and Harding Place, just as she does every day, and let herself soak in the morning. The birds were singing. Heat, already sticky, had started to rise. Above her, in green and white letters, a street sign for “Camryn’s Corner” glinted in the sunlight.
“Happy birthday,” she said. She could feel Camryn in the sun on her face, in the breeze picking up, the way a conifer danced gently across the street. “We about to be outside,” celebrating the life of a fiery dancer and fierce friend always had a joke in her back pocket.
Robinson is the mother of Camryn “Mooka” Gayle, a bright-eyed dancer and senior at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School who died in a car accident in November 2021, at the same Newhallville corner that now bears her name. On Tuesday night, friends and family gathered for a balloon release at the spot, taking time to remember Gayle on the day she was born.
Throughout, the words “Forever Mooka" became a frequent refrain, and a reminder of the imprint one life can have on a surrounding community. Before the end of the evening, the corner had also become a space to honor Gayle's legacy, with a new, vibrantly bright candle venture that her mother is growing out of her home, in hopes that people will remember and celebrate her daughter for years to come.
“My emotions are all over the place,” Robinson said. That afternoon, she’d gotten a call from Gayle’s close friend Shyan Dawson, who had been in the car with her at the time of the accident. Both of them had taken time to fall apart, and then gather themselves again. “The grief—it’s a lot. This is not only for me, it’s also for her siblings.”
Vivian Robinson and Shamar Gayle.
In years past, friends and family have held larger block parties and balloon releases on the street, pushing for safety measures like speed bumps along the way. But this year, Robinson wanted a smaller celebration, she said. Last summer, after a drawn-out process and emotional final hearing with the City of New Haven's Board of Alders, she held a corner unveiling at the end of June. That was it, she said at the time: she was done planning events there.
But this summer, something told her to hold another remembrance of Gayle, who never passed up a chance to celebrate properly. Robinson, who lives nearby on West Ivy Street, survived two heart attacks and a wrist injury earlier this year (“God is so good,” she said of her survival). Alongside her daughter, she's mourning the five-year loss of Gayle's father, who died of cancer in August 2021.
She comes by the corner every day to talk to her daughter, even in the quiet of winter. It’s in those months, when a pine tree across the street starts swaying with the weight of snow and wind, “I’m like, she’s here.”
In those moments that Robinson feels her daughter’s spirit, she’s also acutely aware of her physical absence. Gayle passed away when she was just 17, on the cusp of adulthood. In the five years since her death, Robinson has watched Gayle’s childhood friends go to college, start new relationships, and welcome their first children into the world. That part is joyful, she said—there are several babies now named in Gayle’s honor in her orbit—but it’s also heavy.
Tuesday, community members gathered to make sure that neither she nor members of Gayle’s family have to hold any of that weight alone. On a tree-lined, shaded section of Sherman Avenue just beyond the corner, attendees stopped at a memorial altar lined with photos of Gayle at different stages of her young life, from praise dancing at Thomas Chapel Church to posing for the camera in between extracurriculars in high school.
Top: Emanni Washington, who became close with Gayle when both of them were students at King-Robinson Interdistrict Magnet School. Bottom: A memorial altar that Elizabeth Robinson set up.
Above a row of flickering candles, a rainbow-colored pinwheel stood still in the warm afternoon air, surrounded by yellow fabric roses and a small stuffed animal. Down the block, a bouquet of yellow-and-white balloons, tied to a chair, bobbed gently on their long, taut strings. What felt like dozens of spotted lanternflies flew by, their red bodies adding pops of color to the sidewalk.
In the other direction, middle schoolers Journee Hunter and Emerie Drame watched over Gayle’s diploma and graduation sash printed with the word DANCE, awarded posthumously to her mother at Co-Op’s graduation ceremonies in 2022. The two, who are in the sixth and seventh grade at Highville Charter School, are both Gayle’s godsisters. So when Robinson arranged an evening to remember her presence, it wasn’t even a question that they would be there.
“I want to, like, live up to her,” said Journee, who wants to be a dermatologist when she grows up. Because she and Emerie were still very young when Gayle passed, Journee doesn’t remember much, but knows about Gayle through the stories her family shares. “Like not be her, but I want to make sure I’m like her.”
Vivian Robinson, Gayle’s grandmother and one of the matriarchs who raised her, waited in the passenger seat of a cool car nearby, taking a moment to gather herself before stepping out onto the sidewalk. Every time she drives by the sign, she said, she’s hit by a new wave of grief.
“I miss her. I just miss her,” she said. She can still remember the bright-eyed little girl who had a reliable sweet tooth and spent days at her home, “cutting up” with a joke that was always ready to go.
“She used to come down to my house and we would just have a good time,” Vivian Robinson said. While she visits the corner often, she added, she also makes it a point to go to Evergreen Cemetery, where her granddaughter rests beside her late husband, Foster Robinson. “That was my baby.”
Top: Journee Hunter and Emerie Drame. Bottom: Joli Boria (right) and her son, Caleb Camryn. Caleb was born exactly a year after Gayle's funeral in November of 2021. “She’s fearless. Really, really brave. He’s the same way,” she said at an unveiling for Camryn's Corner last year.
As 6 p.m. neared, friends and family members began to pull up. Sharnay Robinson, who is Elizabeth Robinson’s niece, emerged from her car with her young daughter, Mia. Sharnay, who now works in healthcare at Yale-New Haven Hospital, is about a decade older than Gayle, meaning that she watched her grow up. While Mia was just a baby when Gayle passed, she’s learned about her through her mom, her aunt, and her cousins.
“I just feel like she should be here,” Sharnay said. “It’s just a sad situation. Grieving—it doesn’t get better.”
While Sharnay lives in Hamden, “I ride by here a lot,” she said. It doesn’t ever get easier. “I just think about her. It feels good to just be out here, to celebrate her.”
“This is her birthday, and I’m gonna celebrate it like it’s mine,” added Emanni Washington, who became close with Gayle when both of them were students at King-Robinson Interdistrict Magnet School. “That’s my girl. She was always a listening ear, always the friend to calm me down.”
That renewed sense of calm, even in Gayle’s aching absence, is part of the hope behind “Camryn’s Candles,” Robinson added as she looked over a table covered with hand-poured candles in shades of pink, cream, yellow and gold and dusted in gold glitter.
Top: Family friend Lynel "China" Caple with some of the candles. Bottom: Designs inspired by Gayle's life.
They’re a form of therapy, she explained. When her daughter died five years ago, Robinson wasn’t sure if or how she could go on. Then her son, Shamar Gayle, tried to pull her from the thick fog of grief.
“He said, ‘Mom, you gotta get out of this depression,’” she remembered. “He knows I love candles and he ordered me a candle kit.” The rest was history.
From candles that came from a kit, Robinson began experimenting with hand-poured candles, using dyes, ingredients, and designs that reminded her of her daughter. The champagne-inspired candles, for instance, are a nod to the fact that Gayle would have been 21 last year, and probably would have found a way to celebrate in style.
The glitter, the bright hues, and the shades of butter and sunshine yellow, are for the vibrant presence that is now missing from their daily lives.
“I love it,” Robinson said when asked if the practice is therapeutic for her. “It’s my peace.”