It has been one year since you left us. In time for this anniversary, I went back through your photographs to build this website for you.

Hundreds of them — twenty years’ worth, from multiple continents. I relived every adventure I was lucky enough to be part of. But something else happened too. Seeing the whole body of work at once, I understood again how uniquely creative you were, and what an intuitive eye you had for finding beauty in everything.

Light on a windowsill at home. A street corner in Asia. The landscapes you kept going back out to explore, year after year, camera in hand.

You never treated any of it as ordinary. That was the gift. And you passed three passions on to me.

Turn Life Into Poetry

You did it with a camera. I’ve done it my whole life with writing — though I love taking photos too, which I clearly owe to you.

Your photographs keep giving us joy, laughter and inspiration. And consolation, which is what I need today, on the days when it hits me hardest that you’re not here. I open a album and there you are — not in the picture, but in the choice of the picture. In what you decided was worth stopping for.

Find Your Energy in Music

You listened to music your entire life, and you played it your entire life. Because of that, it has never once been absent from mine. It’s been the constant — through every move, every job, every uncertain stretch.

These days I’m playing a lot of the classical music you loved, especially the Mozart operas. The Magic Flute. Don Giovanni. I put them on and I’m not just remembering you. I’m somehow in the room with you again.

That’s the strange power of it. Music holds the memories, but it also does the other thing you were so good at. It lifts. It points forward. It refuses to let grief be the only note in the room.

Stay Curious About New Worlds

It has been twenty-five years since I left Switzerland for the United States. I’ve thought about that a lot this year. I don’t believe I would have found the courage to start a new life chapter on a continent I knew only as a visitor before — if you hadn’t raised me to be curious, to assume the unfamiliar was interesting rather than threatening. That openness was yours before it was mine.

Which is why some of my favorite memories are of you coming to us. Your visits to Los Angeles. To Seattle. And above all that road trip to the Grand Canyon — us on the road, the country unrolling in front of us, you photographing out the window like you were on assignment.

Then the Skywalk. That glass platform hanging out over nothing at all, the whole canyon under your feet. You loved it. You stood there taking it in like you’d been waiting years for exactly that view.

I can still see you there. I think I always will.

So: thank you, mom. Thank you for the poetry, the music and the curiosity. Between them, they have shaped nearly every good thing in my life.

Thank you for your wonderful photos. They go straight to my heart, and they keep us connected while you continue on your own Skywalk.

Love you – and miss you!

Marc

♥️

Skywalk on Grand Canyon West, Arizona, January 1, 2008