TRIBUTE TO MY MOTHER PUBLISHED IN WOMEN'S VOICES FOR CHANGE 5/10/15

I am proud that the piece I wrote about my mother is now published in Women's Voices For Change.

 Please feel free to comment on the site. Here is the first paragraph; please go to Women's Voices for Change website to read the entire piece and would love to read your comments.

http://womensvoicesforchange.org/else-graupe-1912-2007-a-mothers-day-tribute.htm
OR

http://bit.ly/1bHwcSj

"...As my mother, Else Graupe, lay dying in hospice, I sat by her side creating a visual diary of the last moments of her life—drawing the wasted, thin, inert body on papers that I had selfishly garnered from the nurses’ station to distract me from the pain of losing the one person who always “had my back” despite our seemingly irreconcilable lifestyles. Pencil in hand, I scrutinized her as I had never done before; the face that I thought was so familiar to me since childhood became an abstraction of lines and forms seen afresh with the wonder of a daughter who sees her mother for the first time through the art of constructing the parts into a whole picture.

I began with the strong jaw—that very jaw that I had argued with since childhood. The jaw that, in a moment of desperate frustration, called her taunting offspring “a bad seed.” I was a disrespectful, iron-willed girl, constantly challenging my mother’s strict rules, not wanting to follow the tightrope of tradition..."