In the fall of 2022, about two years after my mom passed away, I created a series of collages and lyrical prose on my process of mourning, drawing from photo documentation, journal notes, and other experiential art I made in the first two years of grieving. Below is my ode to motherloss from that time, part 1, eye am in here.
With care,
Erin
Hello and welcome to this first installment of my micro-memoir.
Today would be my mom’s 74th birthday. I feel celebratory as I share from my experience and honor her. My grief has taken the shape of storyteller. I feel appreciation for you open hearted reader, and all the stories you continue to tend. We need each other’s witness.
Happy Birthday Mom! 🌈🌸 We love you and miss you and know you’re helping us grow the plants and remember the birds and wild things with all your signs.
May 6, 1950 - November 5, 2020
Eye Am in Here
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Ethereal and strange, this image within an image reached me like a tidal | totem, as crushing grief and beauty intermingled in the liminality of deep transformative processes, a seed within seed.
Great Grandmother
Grandmother
Mother
Daughter
When I read that we live within our grandmother's bodies, an egg inside our mother egg I felt a deep sense of reverence for how intimate, fragile, magical and physical our living connection is with the invisible. I re-read a journal entry I wrote during my mom’s illness:
As my mom is dying, I feel my Mother, she is everywhere, she is in everything.
Tich Nhat Hanh wrote of his mother 7 years after hear death:
Our Mother's and Father's continue in us. Our liberation is their liberation. Whatever we do for our transformation is also for their transformation, and for our children and their children. When you touch the present moment, you touch the past and the future.
I experienced it so. In the grace of illness, I felt the enormity of my whole Mother, beyond my singular mom, beyond her form, in everything around me. Wild grief. Beautiful movement.
A week after her passing I trace and recall my mom’s eye from memory, standing on the shore of inexplicable grief asking where are you, how can I not see you?
In my mind’s eye I connect my hand to her beauty; photographing the final drawing becomes the start of an archive of co-creation with her. My liberation is her liberation.
I grapple over and over with, a stone, a feather, this physical absence. How can it be? How. How. How.
Howl.
Her physical disappearance, more than during her illness, a mysterious and long process of re-membering my Mom in the everything. Ongoing. What beauty.
How strange this missing body when everything feels alive.
‘How strange this missing body when everything feels alive’ I feel this deeply right now in my process of grieving my father and paying all my attention to the grief. I also align with all that Thay says about our ancestors live through us so our freedom free them too! Nothing is ever lost. Thank you for this beautiful series and sharing your vulnerability 💜