he sits with the silence, like an old friend
shadows holding the pieces, he forgot to name
There’s something about the way stillness tells stories louder than sound. I didn’t ask him pose for this image; the moment found itself—tired, unfiltered, and full of things we didn’t want to say. The shadows moved like memory, persistent, echoing things we wanted to forget. The photograph, though simple, is a conversation between grief and grace.
He had just received the kind of news that rearranges time—the kind that asks the heart to hold more than its capable of carrying. The doctors said what doctors say when there’s little left to do. He understood without needing the words. There’s a particular ache in grieving someone whose breath you can still feel on your skin.
But this image—it doesn’t document that pain. It makes space for it without asking it to explain itself. Love, in this frame, doesn’t announce itself. It just sits there—quiet, faithful, worn around the edges.
Photographs like this don’t prove anything. They only translate what can’t be narrated—that presence and absence drink from the same well and come from the same source.
My mother would’ve loved this photograph. Not for what it shows, but for what it holds.