Psychoanalysis uses the term 'anticipatory grief' referring to 'the feelings experienced by those waiting for someone to die. Knowing their loved one is dying, they start the mourning process before the actual death. (...) But it could be argued that anticipatory grief is in fact a phenomenon that occurs when the one we are mourning is very far from death. (...) The result of anticipatory grief is the painful realization that the object already contains the possibility of its non-existence. A nothingness is created.

- Darian Leader

It is a daring move to talk about a loved person as if they were no longer alive. 

With this project, I am encouraging you to think about your losses, those that have happened, and more so, about those that are still to take place. 

I am inviting you to meet my mother.

Talking about difficult emotions was never easy for us, but we had no difficulty spending hours on end walking in the woods. Mama would ask what to wear for the photographs, and I would ask her to show me the latest outfits she had made out of second hand fabrics. We’d agree on a couple and then walk into the landscape.

In the years since my migration, her emails to me have changed in tone, from a mother’s humorous reports on the daily life of the family and the village, to intimate confessions of a reckoning woman. In a beautiful, poetic language, she shared with me fragments of her dark and fantastic dreams, her scattered thoughts about the lost time, and the overwhelming fear of losing yet more of it. In those letters she shared what a child does not necessarily want to hear from their parent. 

But I keep reading. Hoping she might leave me prepared for the future without her.