“Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” ~ Bell Hooks
This project explores love and the challenge of having enough of it to sustain caregiving—one of life’s most profound and demanding acts. It looks closely at the emotional terrain of parenting one’s own parents through the often painful arc of decline and dying. Nothing about it gets easier. And yet, meaning and tenderness still live inside the quietest, slow moving moments.
Like love, caregiving is an act of will. It’s a daily reckoning with exhaustion, frustration, loneliness, and grace. It’s the ache of time, the cruelty of aging, the unwinding of a life. It is also a return—to the beginning, to the portal that brought you here. Your first love.
Over the past two years, I cared for my mother as she battled lymphoma and then acute myeloid leukemia—treatment-induced, sudden and unforgiving. I grew stem cells in my body to replace hers, changing her blood type and DNA to my own. She was determined to remain in New York, and I moved between coasts, doing what I could with my siblings. When she finally agreed to come to California—where we all live—it was already too late. Despite all our efforts, she passed away not long after relocating.
Creating images has long helped me navigate life’s chaos—from a transient childhood, to becoming a young mother, to the early loss of my father and, more recently, my mother. I photographed when I could and wrote when I couldn’t, always seeking a tangible form to process and bear witness to the moments I struggled to hold emotionally.
Soon after my mother’s death, a friend asked me to photograph her own mother, whom she lives with and cares for. At 99, her mother is joyful and vibrant. At first, stepping back into this kind of caregiving space was painful. But I found a kind of catharsis in witnessing their closeness—a shift from loss to presence.
This project, First Love, documents these intimate end-of-life caregiving relationships. Recently, my stepdaughter and I decided that she would photograph her own mother as she cares for her grandmother—a softer approach that also reflects the project’s intent: to encourage others to find meaning in caregiving and see documentation as an act of love and remembrance.
This work hopes to illuminate the grace that exists within difficulty. To say: it’s worth seeing, remembering, and honoring.
