Make a New Start or Die

Make a New Start or Die
Artist book, 2023
Photographs, family archives, personal journals, and essay
Edition of one

This book was made in the last weeks of my mother's life. After a year of estrangement, we found each other again. I brought her home from a nursing facility and cared for her through one week of home hospice, where we finally spoke to each other without defenses.

With her permission, I photographed those final days. The images sit alongside pictures from our family archive, pages from the daybooks where she recorded the details and fears of her daily life, and an essay tracing the estrangement, the return, and what came after. Together they trace an inheritance of unspoken pain, the failures of institutional care, the quiet labor of tending a dying body, and the repair that became possible even with almost no time left.

My mother spent most of her life refusing to be photographed. That she let me see her, at the end, was a gift I still don't fully understand. This book doesn't try to resolve who she was, or make her fully knowable. It holds the difficulty of our relationship next to the plain fact that, in the end, we managed to be present with each other. That was enough.

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