She Carries It All

On life and loss, giant bees and red dresses

“In difficult times, carry something beautiful in your heart.” ―Blaise Pascal

These words have echoed in my mind both as I’ve held the terrible headlines of the week and revisited this story I’m sharing here. May something beautiful find you.

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It’s no ordinary day when you find yourself trekking out to a secret cove to take photos with a giant bee, but my friend Abby is no ordinary human.

We’ve known each other for almost twenty years, and when I began taking portraits, she became one of my first muses. Abby is one of those rare humans comfortable in her own skin—unabashedly and unapologetically herself.

A few years before the bee capades, we found ourselves by our favorite river, nestled in the Sequoias. Abby was pregnant with twin boys and had procured a red cape, so the obvious next step was donning body glitter and romping to the river to capture a few images before her boys charged into the world.

Little did I know that years later, at the beginning of the pandemic, I would watch wildflowers push through rubble at the beach and be flooded with a mysterious and unshakeable urge to photograph a woman in a red dress amid the blooms. I couldn’t articulate it at the moment, but the red dress became a symbol of defiance against the despair of that time, a sign of life in air thick with talk of death. 

After I did that first shoot, creativity pulled a cheeky little trick and surprised me. What I thought would be an isolated session turned into a series of portraits I call the Red Dress Project. This project has taken me well beyond what I first imagined, all beginning on the banks of the river with Abby.

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Sometime last summer, Abby called to tell me she was pregnant with twins again, about to pull the ludicrous statistic of having four boys three and under. I gasped. And then I gasped again when I realized there was excitement in her voice. It’s no ordinary human who would be excited about two sets of twins, but Abby is no ordinary human. 

A few months later, another call came, and this time we gasped with tears as she relayed that one of the twins had passed away in utero. Every pregnancy loss is brutal, but this one felt even more so—in situations like this, the mother carries both babies to term. For months, death and life lay side by side. 

I’m not normally a poet, but as I thought about all she was holding, how brave she was to go on loving when part of her was dying, the only words that seemed to make sense came out in this piece. 

A few months after the birth, after the terrible mix of hellos and goodbyes, the family came to California for a visit. It seemed only right to pull out the red dress and trek to a hidden cove with leftover Burning Man sculptures as an attempt to capture this devastating time.

The air was windy and wild, and we wrapped up baby Finn as tight as we could and rolled the red fabric out against the bay, for the brother who was not there. 

As the wind warned of storms, I watched Abby walk over jagged rocks and turn to face the menacing skies, the red waving stark against the bay. And I marveled at this woman who had learned the terrible secret of carrying it all.

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Thank you for reading Adventures in Being Human. If you are enjoying it, I’d love for you to share it—word of mouth is always the best way to find more kindred souls.