My mother died in a car accident when I was eight years old. She didn’t like having her picture taken, leaving me with only a small handful of images in which she was a willing participant. In this photograph, she looks directly at the camera, at me as the viewer, and smiles. However, the image itself is deteriorating, showing my mother in one light and only the cracks in another – the diptych presents these two views side by side. It has become a haunting metaphor for my fragmented memory of her and for our own fragility. She oscillates between being ever-present, fixed beyond the cracks in the image, and gone forever, like a whisper in the night.