Finding the Letter in Someone’s Life

Today is ten years since my Mom died. I wondered how I should mark it but then slipped a disc Saturday. Oh well. Slogging through pain until my MRI tomorrow. She would think a fuss stupid anyway.

I decided to share here a snippet from a piece I wrote last year (actually my favorite piece) about her photography and also a kind of a love song to time and life.

Here’s to you, Mom. You never lost your ability to look truly happy in a brasserie. And I found in your work, your pictures, a letter to me, from you and God.

From Beauty and Ballast, August 2025

Some of her photos were wonderfully poignant --- flowers up so close that they edged toward the surreal, their blooms flaming out, some of the petal edges ripped. She captured highly energetic landscapes too, with layered, sometimes cryptic or ruptured backgrounds, but everything always attenuated by beautiful color and classical composition. And there were many photos where what came across most strongly was a shared hush between seen and seer: a kind of stealth quiescence in her witness that suggested a deep respect for all of life and nature and people.

And that squared with who she was. Although my mom was quite private and did not speak often of her faith, it occurred to me recently —— as I’ve wandered through her world again and even showed my boys —- that what rang through the corpus felt almost like a prayer, or a form of worship, and strangely like an assurance to me too, sent through time.