An Accidental Archive

Pandemic Zoom Kisses on My Mother's 83rd Birthday

Today is my mother, CarolynAnn’s birthday. She would have turned 83 today, but she died in 2022 from dementia-related causes. This morning, missing her and feeling a little down, I opened a folder I hadn’t looked at in years.

During the pandemic, after we made the difficult decision to move her into a care facility, I coordinated weekly Zoom calls with the home care aides. There were calendar invitations, phone calls, reminders, and making sure someone could help her get in front of the camera at the right time—and sometimes even keep her from walking away in the middle of the call.

For 15 or 20 minutes each week, we got to be together. Somewhere along the way, I started taking screenshots. I honestly don’t remember why. Maybe she made a cute face. Maybe I was trying to hold onto a moment that I knew would disappear as quickly as the Zoom window closed.

I wasn’t thinking about making art. I wasn’t documenting history. I was just taking screenshots and dropping them into a folder on my desktop computer. I didn’t realize I was making something that I would need six years later.

Looking through the folder today, I realized I had accidentally built an archive. As I scrolled through dozens of screenshots, something unexpected happened. My researcher brain and my artist brain quietly took over. I stopped looking at individual photographs and started seeing patterns. Little visual conversations began to emerge.

The screenshots started looking like storyboards or comic panels. Instead of individual moments, they became little sequences telling tiny stories. I noticed that I was always trying to get my mother to blow me a kiss. Sometimes she would. Sometimes she was too busy laughing. Sometimes she was in the middle of telling a wonderfully weird winding story that no longer quite made sense.

I found screenshots showing us making exactly the same expression. In some, we were both laughing. And in some, we were both waving goodbye. I noticed how much I was smiling in almost every frame.

I started pulling the screenshots into little groups, adding dates, cropping, arranging, and rearranging them. What had been a folder of screenshots slowly became something else. An art project.

Looking at them now feels surreal. We both look so happy. If someone stumbled upon these images without any context, they might simply think, “Here are two people who are happy to see each other, laughing and catching up on a Zoom call.” And they’d be right.

But I remember those conversations differently, too. I remember hanging up many of those Zoom calls and immediately weeping. I remember wondering how much longer she would recognize me. How much longer would I only get to see her through the screen? I remember the fear, the uncertainty, and the isolation that so many of us carried during those years.

Those memories are true. And these little screenshots are also true. That’s what I love about images, art, and photography. They can hold more than one truth at the same time. There are layers.

The screenshots don’t erase the grief. They simply remind me that grief wasn’t the only thing there. There was laughter. There were stories. There were blown kisses through a computer screen. There was joy.

Looking back now, I realize these screenshots carry two histories at once. One is the history we all remember: the pandemic, lockdowns, masks, isolation. The other is the history of how we found ways to stay connected anyway.

Today, on what would have been my mother’s 83rd birthday, I thought I was opening a folder full of sadness. Instead, I found an archive of connections. And somewhere between sorting the images, adding the dates, and arranging them into little conversations, I noticed something else: working on a little art project changed the way I felt.

Not because it made me miss her less. It didn’t. But because making something gave me another way to be with her. Maybe that’s one of the quiet gifts of art. Sometimes it doesn’t take grief away. It simply teaches us another way to see that love will always be there.