SAVANNAH MOHACSI

In 2021, my grandmother entered the final stages of lymphoma. My mother and I cared for her through hospice, tending to her in the slow, intimate decline. In her final days, she told us her last wish: to be cremated and returned to the land where she was born and raised in San Luis, Colorado. A few months after her passing, we traveled there to honor that request.

 

The land has been in our family for generations. She and her siblings grew up modestly there; bathing in the river, farming the soil, living directly from what the land provided. Though I had never visited before, returning her there felt instinctively right. We buried her ashes beside a stream and planted a lavender bush above her. Her sister had passed just two weeks earlier; their ashes were mixed together in the soil. What could have been a heavy farewell became something unexpectedly beautiful. Walking barefoot into the ice-cold stream, I felt a jolt run through my body and imagined her doing the same as a child. In that moment, grief felt less like loss and more like return. I felt like I belonged.

 

On that land, a cousin showed me a sun-dried elk spine found nearby, and told me I could keep it. I brought it home with me. It now serves as a physical reminder of the land that raised her. The spine becomes both relic and symbol: she was the backbone of our family, and that land was the backbone of her life.

 

Lavender rises from the vertebrae, in homage to the lavender planted at her burial site. Threaded roots extend downward, resembling spinal nerves embedding into soil. Lavender has long been used to calm anxiety and soothe the nervous system. My grandmother battled depression throughout her life. In this piece, the bloom emerges directly from the spine, the very structure that houses the nervous system, suggesting rest where there was once unrest, and gentleness where there was once strain.

 

This work reflects on belonging as something embodied and enduring: how bodies return to earth, how land holds memory, and how the atoms that once formed a life continue in new forms. The backdrop is a photograph I took of the land in San Luis, grounding the piece in its origin. The same soil that grew her now holds her.