Print Media & Collage

50”W x 42”L

2026

 I never imagined I would live in Bay Village. Growing up in Lakewood, we called it “the Bubble” and used to make fun of it.  But in 1989, ten-year-old Amy Mihaljevic disappeared here in broad daylight, and the world I understood suddenly felt scary-breakable. I remember thinking: How could anyone bring a child into a world with the inexplicable chance of them disappearing forever?

And the losses came anyway. My nephew Gabe died suddenly in 2023. Then Dylan, a sixteen-year-old from my son’s class, died in a tragic accident. His family lived in the very house where Amy once lived. Grief had found the same place again.

Garden Song is about what we do when a young life is cut short. We plant. We tend. We remember. We make sense of how we will remember them. Gabe’s name now grows in his childhood garden among strawberries, rhubarb, and fig trees.

Maybe this is one of the small, stubborn things love can do: keep something living where someone should still be.