About the project

“I hold your hand and, carefully, try to capture it. Imprint on my brain the texture of your wrinkly skin, the warmth of your touch, the way your fingers wrap around mine.” After seven years of illness, the fight against cancer is coming to an end and the author is torn between conflicting feelings: Watching her sister become a mother as her father’s health declines. Watching a new life grow while another passes away has redefined her understanding of time and made her aware of the fragility of life.

At times, when home felt too close, nature gave her mind a safe place to rest. All the while, the forest’s slow growth and decay resembled the illness that was consuming life as she knew it. You Felt the Roots Grow was written at a time between hope and grief. It is the personal experience of a daughter coming to terms with the bittersweetness of transience, the poetry within loss and the incompleteness of memory.