Why I photograph the quiet moments of grief and loss | Caroline Catlin

49,817 views ・ 2021-04-13

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You know those awkward icebreaker games,
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when everyone goes around and answers something
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like, "What's your favorite superpower?"
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When I was a kid, I loved those games.
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I believed I had the perfect answer.
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People would start sharing and I would wait,
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bouncing in my seat with excitement.
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And when it was my turn,
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I would proudly tell everyone, "The superpower I want most of all
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is to see people's emotions in color, hovering in the air around them."
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Wouldn't it be cool if you could see how happy a friend was to see you,
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like they'd walk in and it would just fill with the color yellow.
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Or you could tell when a stranger needed help.
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You'd pass them on the street
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and you'd see this long trail of blue behind them.
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This was usually the moment
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where I would look around at the many blank faces
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telling me yet again,
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my cool superpower, it hadn't landed well with my fellow fourth graders.
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I was an awkward child.
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That hasn't really changed.
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And neither has my deep appreciation for the emotional world around me
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or my desire to both witness and capture the elusiveness of feelings.
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As I grew older,
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I started paying attention to the people and the stories I came across
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and I wrote down what I saw.
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When writing didn't feel like enough, I learned photography
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and I began documenting the moments that felt most precious to me.
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With a camera in hand,
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I learned the art of deciding what to include in the frame
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and what to let blur into the background.
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I graduated high school. I went to college.
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I studied a combination of psychology and art.
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No shortage of feelings there, I can assure you.
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And then ...
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I got sick.
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Not in a dramatic way.
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I didn't start screaming in agony
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or wake up unable to move or suddenly forget how to speak.
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Eventually, all those things would happen to some degree,
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but my path from wellness to illness
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was a slow, persistent movement towards deep sickness.
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I spent three years trying to identify the cause.
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I met with numerous doctors and the answer was always the same.
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There was nothing wrong with me.
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Over and over.
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Despite my persistent low-grade fever and joint pain and muscle aches,
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I was told, "Go see a therapist,
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practice more self-care."
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I started to believe they were right.
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Maybe nothing was wrong.
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Every test that came back normal
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had me falling further into a hole of self-doubt.
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I started grad school
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hoping that I would somehow get over this mysterious illness
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and I could return to life as it was before.
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Still there was a small, unwavering part of me that knew.
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Despite my symptoms not lining up with anything that made sense,
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I knew something was wrong.
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Eventually my cognitive symptoms worsened.
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Brain fog and memory loss and word-finding,
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and a doctor agreed to order an MRI.
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Assuring me they didn't think they'd find anything concerning.
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Instead ...
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they found a golf ball-sized mass in my right parietal lobe.
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And just like that, everything changed.
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I called my parents
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and I scheduled a date for brain surgery,
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and I dropped out of my grad program.
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They told me the tumor is probably benign
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and with its removal that I'd likely make a full recovery.
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I wish with all of my heart
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I could tell you they were right.
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I wish the story ended here.
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Six days after surgery, the pathology report came back
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telling us the tumor was not benign.
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It was something called an anaplastic astrocytoma
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and while the surgery had been successful and the tumor was gone,
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the microscopic cancerous cells it left behind remained,
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impossible to remove.
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In other words, I was officially diagnosed with a rare,
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aggressive, incurable brain cancer.
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Not my best day.
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My cancer is treatable, but it's highly recurrent.
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And when it does recur, it tends to return as terminal.
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The timeline of when, it's unpredictable.
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Some people get 15 years.
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Some people just get one.
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My doctors explained to me
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that while chemo and radiation would reduce the likelihood of recurrence,
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every three months for the rest of my life,
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I would need to return to the hospital to check for new tumor growth.
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As I listened, I met real grief for the first time.
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I thought of that superpower I'd once wanted
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and I imagined a deep dark purple filling the room around us.
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A cloak of color that I knew was going to stay with me.
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I'm 27.
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I thought to myself, how can this be happening?
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I was as determined as I was devastated.
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I wanted to fight and recover
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and I wanted as many years of life as possible.
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As I once again began to regain my strength,
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I started to pay attention to the people and the stories around me.
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In the hospital, I would push my walker down the hallway
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and I would steal glances into the rooms I'd passed
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and I would see these tiny worlds contained within them.
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Sometimes I could feel joy so big,
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I just wanted to stop and stand in it.
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Other times, the despair and the sadness made me want to run.
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About three months after I left the hospital
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I found out about an organization
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that offers free photo sessions
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to critically ill children and their families.
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Right away I called them.
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I set up a meeting and I signed up to volunteer.
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Despite my radiation-induced fatigue and my persistent grief,
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the idea of giving back in that way,
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it lit a spark within me that had been recently extinguished.
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For the first time in a while,
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I felt hope.
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It was as if a thin strand of gold
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had begun to weave its way through my coat of grief.
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And the color was blending slowly into something new.
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This organization offers their services
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to children at any stage of serious illness.
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And often they are joy-filled and they're celebratory.
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Other times a family asks for a photographer
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to document a child at the end of their life.
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Sometimes these are the only professional photos
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a family will ever have of their child.
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Often they're the last ones ever taken.
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The first call I got
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was for an end-of-life session for a three-year-old girl
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who'd been very sick for a long time.
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"She might pass while you're there,"
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they warned me.
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"Are you sure you're up for it?"
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"Yes," I told them, completely unsure if I was.
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Now, I could tell you about this little girl's death,
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which happened a few days after I photographed her.
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I could, but I'm not going to.
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Instead, I want to show you the little girl's mother.
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How she kissed and stroked the hair of her daughter
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as she lay in that too big hospital bed.
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Even as the world as she knew it ended forever,
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she was there to give love to her daughter.
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I want you to see the dying girl's older brother.
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How he cried,
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but also how he took his yellow airplane
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and he flew it above her head.
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How I saw then a gesture of hope,
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colorful emotion, orange and gold.
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I want to bring you with me into the rooms
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where the mothers hold their babies and the families say goodbye.
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And I want to offer you the chance to see in frames,
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to choose the point of focus and blur the background,
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to see the details we so often miss, the moments of grace and beauty
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we assume don't exist in those desperate places.
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In the hardest moments imaginable,
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those families,
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they choose to love,
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despite and because of it all.
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I was not raised in religion
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and yet I can tell you, whatever you believe,
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those rooms are holy ground.
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When I was first diagnosed,
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I was certain grief would swallow me whole
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and some days I still think it might.
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I will never be at peace with the fact
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I might not get to be a mother.
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That I might not see my brothers get married,
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that I probably won't become old,
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like really old,
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the kind of old everyone else dreads and tries to fight against.
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I would've made a great old person.
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My grief --
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it's big.
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My fear of dying, of leaving behind the people I love.
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It's enormous.
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And my work photographing death has not erased that.
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Death itself is rarely beautiful
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and the images I capture reflect that too.
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The grief I have seen, the immensity of the loss --
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it's brutal.
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But when I walk into those rooms with that camera,
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my job is to do what I always wanted to do as a child.
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To capture the feeling and the connection and the emotion
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right there in front of me.
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And what I've learned from all these families
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and from my own wild terrain of grief
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is if I pay close enough attention,
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I don't need to see emotion in color after all.
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It's there and it's visible in the details.
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In the way our communities love each other through anything and everything.
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And with my camera,
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I can capture the evidence of that forever,
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and I can give it back to them to keep.
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Right now, my cancer is stable.
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I am so glad that for now,
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I get to keep living.
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Because that's the other side.
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My fear of dying, the pain of loss,
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it's only as strong as how much I love this life
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and the people in it with me.
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None of us are ever ready to say goodbye to the ones we love.
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Loss is devastating and try as we might,
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we can't avoid that shattering grief that follows in its wake.
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My guess is no matter who you are or what you've experienced so far,
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you already knew this.
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You too have grieved
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and all of us will grieve again.
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And when that happens, we will have a right to be angry.
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We can mourn as loudly as we want, and we should.
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But when the worst happens, we have a choice.
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You don't have to stay deep in the dark bitterness of loss
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and let that be the only thing that we see or feel.
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Because the one thing that's as strong and as powerful as our grief
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is our love for those who we have lost.
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And that love will remain
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like thousands of bright, colorful strands,
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woven forever through our cloak of grief,
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beautiful and awful, side by side,
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and ours to keep.
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Thank you.
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