Held by Family, Held in Memory
Sometimes a family creates its own language for remembering someone they have lost.
A mother lost her son far too early in a motorcycle accident. He left behind two young daughters—girls who would grow up carrying their father with them largely through memory and the stories of the people who loved him.
Then something curious began happening. The family started finding dimes.
A dime on the ground. Another in an unexpected place. Then another. Over time, the women began to regard them as small messages from him—a comforting sign that he was all right, that he was still thinking about them, and that somehow he remained near.
That became the idea behind the painting. I imagined the family gathered around a park bench. Beneath them I created a circular brick setting with an oversized dime incorporated into the pavement. The mother holds another dime in her hand while the two daughters watch.
And the son is there too. Not as a literal person standing in the scene, but as a quiet presence—something between memory, imagination, and faith.
None of this existed in a single photograph. The composition was created to tell their story, using the dime as the small symbol that had come to mean so much.
The dime itself is ordinary. What the family came to see in it was anything but.
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