A Portrait Of Healing

October 16, 2020

The strange and unexacting ways we meet people in our lives is just incredible… I was walking through an antique store, looking for props and met the owner. After a heated negotiation on a chair I wanted, she asked me what I needed it for and I said “an art project”. I showed her my work and she noticed my love for flowers, so she gave me the contact of a florist in Maryland. I instantly loved her flowers! They looked so alive and beautiful, unlike the artificial looking ones.

We got together and began working on several projects. While working together she shared with me her personal story, about her, her daughter and the struggle they overcame of fighting for that little 10 year old girl’s life.

This image is very special to me, it tells a story about survival and unconditional love of a mother to her daughter. She fought for her life for years as a child and had multiple brain surgeries. This story is a happy one! That girl is now a woman, alive and well and the mother who I personally know, never let the pain harden her heart. She is an amazing person and is just as loving as before towards everyone around her. We stayed close friends and she shared this with me: 

A letter from a mother: It was the headaches that first upended our life. When she was 10 years old, my daughter started getting sudden, excruciating headaches that made her vomit and pass out. Later she would be fine. Months later, she started laughing about “seeing two of everything,” I realized we needed to see a pediatric neurologist because this must be serious, I thought, like migraines. The neurologist looked into her eyes with a pen light, she suggested she go to the MRI, “just to see.” Afterwards the doctor called me and only me into her office. She sat in her chair in front of mine, set her hands on mine and very slowly said: “you’re daughter has a brain tumor. It is quite large. You need to go to the hospital now.” The surgeries that saved her life also left her with traumatic brain injury and so we’ve spent a decade feeling our way through a maze of medical visits to figure out what to do about her anxiety, mood disturbances and panic attacks. But through it all, my daughter remained a force of nature.