Picking up the Pieces – This photographic series is an exploration of memory, grief, and the long path of healing from a loss that reshaped my life before I fully understood it. When I was six years old, my sister died of cancer at the age of five. It was the night after Christmas. My father and I were away visiting family while my mother stayed home caring for my sister, who we knew was nearing the end of her life. When we returned, she was gone. What was left was silence. Her absence became something my family could not bear to speak of, and so it vanished from language, but never from my body, my heart, or my memory.

These images are not literal retellings of events. They are emotional landscapes—fragments of memory, echoes of childhood, and symbolic spaces where grief has lived quietly for decades. The work reflects the moment I lost not only my sister, but also my childhood. The photographs give shape to feelings of isolation, confusion, and abandonment that formed when grief became unspeakable and I became, in many ways, an outsider within my own family.

Through this series, I revisit the child I once was, the one who carried questions with no place to land. These images are acts of remembrance and reclamation. They allow me to acknowledge what was silenced, to hold tenderness for my younger self, and to create room for grief to exist alongside love. In making this work, I am not only honoring my sister’s life, but also healing the inner child who was left standing in the quiet after she was gone.

This project exists as both mourning and mending. It is a way of saying: I remember. I feel. I survived. And I am still finding my way back to myself.