After her mother died, Danielle Geller defaulted to what she knew. Tucked away in her Boston apartment, she spent entire days writing about her life her earliest memories of her mother, sister and father; her childhood and the grandmother who raised her everything leading up to her mother’s final days in a Florida hospital.
Geller wrote 80,000 words, but remained unsatisfied. She still had unresolved questions about her mother. “My mother lived entire lives apart from mine,” Geller noted.
Lauren Crow / High Country News
So Geller, a trained archivist, assembled her mother’s belongings, labeling, dating and describing every photograph, diary and letter.