02/19/2026
There are corners of the human story most people turn their eyes away from. Not out of cruelty, but because the weight of another’s sorrow feels too large to behold. We are taught that pain should be private, hidden, softened before it is shared. But grief has never lived by those rules. Grief is a river that refuses to stay inside its banks. It is tumultuous, unforgiving and and unwilling to be domesticated. An elemental force that shakes you to your core and rewrites everything you thought you knew.
When my nephew passed last month, the world split open in a way I still cannot language. These images were taken inside that rupture. They are uncomfortable. They are tender. They are the kind of truth we instinctively look away from because it reminds us that love can cost everything.
But I have come to believe that bearing witness is one of the last sacred acts we have left. To look into the face of someone’s breaking, not to fix it, not to explain it away, but simply to honor that their heart is doing the holy work of shattering. This is a form of love.
As an artist and as a grieving aunt, I have learned that the camera can become a lantern in these moments. It does not erase the darkness. It simply allows us to see inside it. To see the arms that hold, the trembling that speaks louder than words, the way a family becomes a single body trying to breathe and brace through the unthinkable.
Pain makes us human, but witnessing makes us kin. And sometimes the most uncomfortable images are the ones we need the most because they teach us how to stay. How to remain present in rooms where the air is thick with sorrow. How to honor the children and loved ones who were loved so fiercely that even death cannot quiet their names.
This is what it means to love someone all the way to the edge of this life. You stay. You hold. You break open. You remember. You hold. You witness.
These images are not here to wound. They are here to testify. To the unbearable. To the beautiful. To the love that did not, will not and cannot let go. I love you and ❤️🩹
