Recalling his mother’s final days in Artforum’s September 1989 issue, the late critic Pier Luigi Tazzi wrote that she spoke to him “with the same cautious delicacy that two lovers might use upon discovering, joined in an embrace or immediately after, the strongest, most mysterious, and serious part of the love that unites them and reveals them and this gentleness covers all violence, as it does all pain.” Read in light of ongoing discussions around caregiving and the relational work of motherhood see Nikki Columbus’s contribution to the magazine’s Summer issue Tazzi’s intimate account of his