Stories of Love and Betrayal: On Making My Mother’s Portrait

Frances (you must console me) / archival pigment print / ©Frank Rodick 2012

My mother was tiny, her bones delicate, like a bird’s. When the young woman at the Mount Royal Crematorium handed me her remains, she said, “That’s the lightest box of ashes I’ve ever seen.”

Sealed with tape and never opened, that plain white cardboard box sits on the fourth shelf of my office closet between a pile of bubble wrap that I’ll use someday and a…