Six Years Without Mysti Bluee: What Her Legacy Built

Six years ago this month, I lost my mother during the pandemic. I wrote, a year after she passed, that we lost more than a mother that day — we lost a force of nature. She was our mirror, our motivation, our protector, and the reminder that power can wear lipstick, drive an 18-wheeler, and still tuck you in at night. Six years later, that sentence still holds up exactly as true as the day I wrote it.

She was never one thing, so I stopped trying to be

My mother, Mysti, was a singer, rapper, and actress. She was also someone who drove big rigs for a living and raised me with raw love in circumstances that weren't easy. People who only knew one side of her missed most of who she was. She held space for others even when she had very little of her own to give. That contradiction — performer and fighter, artist and provider — is the closest thing I have to a leadership blueprint. She never let one identity cancel out another, and I've tried to build a company the same way: rooted in culture and lived experience, but disciplined enough to survive contact with public systems and audits.

Grief became the foundation, not the footnote

I've written before that the place that breaks you can become the foundation that builds others, if you stop hiding it. Losing my mother during the pandemic, early in my company's life, is the clearest example I have of that in my own story. Being honest with my team about that loss didn't weaken how they saw me as a leader. It gave them permission to be human too, and the business got stronger for it, not weaker.

That's not a tidy inspirational arc. It's the actual mechanism. Her death shook me, but it also gave birth to this mission. I named the company Mysti's Adult and Family Services because I wanted something that could honor her name while uplifting other people who are navigating loss, instability, or systems that were never built with them in mind.

Her death didn't end her influence on this work. It just moved the influence from her actions to mine.

What six years of building in her name has actually produced

The organizations carrying her name now run Medicaid-aligned programs across California and Washington: housing stabilization, reentry support, enhanced care management, recuperative care. None of that existed the way it does now when she was alive. It exists because losing her convinced me that systems should promote dignity and cultural relevance, not just compliance, and I built toward that conviction for six years straight.

I don't say that to make her death sound worth it. No amount of program growth makes that trade acceptable. I say it because the alternative to building something was letting the grief sit there and do nothing. She didn't raise me to let things sit.

Legacy is still the only scoreboard I trust

I've said this before and it hasn't changed: legacy is what lives when you're gone. Not wealth. Worth. How my kids feel when they say my name, the way I hope people someday feel saying hers through what this company does. Six years without her, the company keeps growing, the mission keeps sharpening, and her name is still on the door of an organization helping people rebuild their lives. That's not closure. It's just what an unfinished tribute looks like while it's still being built.

Keep going

• Five Years Without Mysti Bleu: A Legacy of Strength, Love, and Perseverance

• How I Turned a Life of Pain Into Purpose and Built a Multi-state Business

• Read more from the blog at schachere.com/blog, or book me to speak at schachere.com/contact-giovanne.

If her story moves you, there's more of it inside the free 30-day Inner Circle trial at schachere.com/plans-pricing.