Loving someone through their grief is one of the stranger things a person can be asked to do. You are present to an experience that is not yours, holding space for something you cannot fix or speed up or make easier, and the whole time you are quietly asking yourself what you are willing to absorb and where the line is between loving someone and losing the thread of yourself in the process.

I returned to making with that question and what the work gave back was this: the understanding that real love is not the grand gesture but the act of witnessing. Of staying beside someone in the ordinary difficult moments. Of saying, with your presence, that their life will not go unnoticed because you are here noticing it.

Light that meets a surface without being absorbed bounces back transformed. A mirror gives back what it receives without holding onto it. I have been wondering ever since whether that is what love at its best is supposed to do, and whether most of us know the difference between reflecting someone and absorbing them entirely.