The Love That Remains

We’re going to sing the song of my mother which is also my song. This is the song that takes me home. My only home is my body. It is a beautiful home where I have had to say goodbye to the departed. When they leave me, I am the love that remains.

An orca carried her dead calf for 17 days, refusing to let it sink. At 18, I lost my mother to breast cancer. I have been homesick for 27 years, and for 15 years my practice has kept her image above water.

My devotion keeps her spirit alive, but my work is an attempt to release the inherited pain.

Loving her feels good. Missing her feels hard. Aging without knowing her, woman to woman, is disorienting.

A self-educated, progressive, New York Italian American white woman raising a mixed-race family through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, my mother was our ally. She was politically charged and passionate about justice long before she married my Black father.

She was far from perfect, but she was perfectly here, living and breathing as my mom.

After she died, I remained visibly functional, but the wear and tear of the chronic void led to chronic pain, and ten years later, I developed my first of multiple autoimmune diseases. Anguish lives in the body.

What did I inherit in these diseases? How do I release it?

In 2011, I began a photography series called Presence, my first exploration of her absence. Photography alone wasn’t enough, so I began to work with archival ephemera, self-portraiture, medical records, and writing. Most of all, I work with the time within the destinationless “journey,” where grief and depression become indistinguishable. I have altered her senior portrait many times, an image taken before her marriage to my father, the divorce, the cancer, and becoming a mother of four.

She stays young while I age without her, and my memory of her fades. I talk more with her than about her.

The repetition of photography and printmaking can feel obsessive, but it is also where our relationship evolves beyond the physical and I release somatically: my hands on the paper, on her face, on her handwriting, in her mixtapes.

All these years later, acceptance has lowered the volume on my grief, though it still blasts at times. Between my physical health and my inner life, this work has become urgent to share, not leave piling up in private, because her life deserves to be seen and mine deserves less pain.

Receiving this grant would fund a book, and collaborating with Giulia Boccarossa, an Italy-based photography and art-book designer, would release this work out of my body, pairing images and text across the nonlinear layers of grief. More than that, it would mean exposure, not just for my mom’s life, but for women’s health and the connection, loss, and complexity between mothers and daughters. Not having my mother, and not having children of my own, has deepened my respect for mothers, the motherless, and women without children.

Above all, this work shines a light on how, in the 18 years I knew her, she shaped my adolescent identity through who she was, who she wanted to be, and how she loved me and my family. Now grown, I am still becoming myself, without her, yet because of her.

Even amid the diseases, and in the places I’ve had to reparent myself, what I inherited from her boils down to love.