PICTORIAL STORY
April 11, 2025
WHISPERS
Photography and story by Regina Melo
Introduction by Karen Ghostlaw Pomarico
Born and raised in Brazil and living in Connecticut with her husband since 1995, Regina Melo is an autodidact photographer who works primarily with natural light. Her journey with the camera began with food and crafts, captured in a personal blog she maintained from 2011 to 2014. But over time, photography became something more — a way to hold on, to make sense of memory, emotion, and the quiet beauty of everyday life. In a world filled with noise and contradiction, the act of taking a photograph became her way of listening closely — to herself, to the world, to the stories that often go untold.
Caring for a loved one, especially in their later years, can be all-consuming and emotionally overwhelming. For Regina, the challenge was intensified by distance — living far from her mother meant she could only offer care during short visits, witnessing from afar the quiet changes that signaled the passing of time. Her mother had slowly begun to retreat from the daily rhythms that once brought her joy. And yet, in those visits, there were still moments of closeness, of deep connection that spoke louder than words.
By what felt like grace — or perhaps the invisible thread that so often binds mothers and daughters—Regina happened to be there, holding her mother’s hands, at the exact moment she took her last breath. Her mother passed away from a heart attack, gently and unexpectedly, at the age of 98. That final moment, filled with silence and presence, left Regina with profound sadness, but also with a sense of spiritual closeness — a quiet knowing that, somehow, they had been exactly where they needed to be. It was a goodbye, but also a deep, sacred recognition of love’s enduring presence.
‘Whispers – A Love Letter to My Mother’ is Regina’s way of navigating that loss — of honoring her mother’s life and presence through image and memory. Created in the quiet aftermath of grief, this project offers an intimate window into the final chapters of a mother-daughter bond. It is tender, unguarded, and deeply personal. It is also, in many ways, universal.
Before the quarantine of 2020, Regina offered her photographic skills as a volunteer for nonprofits, using her lens in service of others. But ‘Whispers’ marks a return inward — toward family, toward home, toward the spaces where love and longing live side by side. Through each image, Regina captures not only what was lost, but also what remains: gestures, textures, light. The way love lingers, even after the physical form is gone.
On Mother’s Day, this story asks us to pause. To remember. To feel. It honors the profound, often quiet sacrifices that mothers make, and the invisible threads that bind us to them — across time, across distance, even across silence. ‘Whispers’ is a tribute, a farewell, and a thank you. A love letter written not in words, but in light.
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A Love Letter to My Mother:
On the evening of November 14th, 2022, holding my hands, my mother unexpectedly passed away. She was 98 years old. I say she died unexpectedly because she was not sick, she was at home. She was sleeping and woke up not feeling well. She had a heart attack.
For the last few years before her death, every time I went back to Brazil, I started noticing changes in her daily routine. She stopped cooking, crocheting, knitting, and tending to her plants, all things she loved to do, and she started repeating stories over and over. She would sit alone, lost in her thoughts, looking fragile, lonely and vulnerable. That's when I started taking pictures of her, hoping to capture those moments to preserve and not forget them.
‘Whispers - a Love Letter to My Mother’ is an immersive introspection into the world of my mother, fragments of her final years; it's a personal project, yet I believe it speaks of universal subjects — unconditional love, the slow passing of time, the abiding feeling of loneliness that comes with the finitude of late old age. It was intimidating to capture the essence of someone I love in a photograph. However, it helped me to become very conscious of her vulnerability at those moments in her life. They were intimate and meaningful moments, yet emotionally exhausting and heartbreaking.
I would be by her side for hours, listening to her stories, caring for her, sleeping with her, immersing myself in her world.
For the first time since my mother passed away, I went back to her house last February. It was overwhelming and painful to be back there. Grief is weird; like everything else, it's different for everyone. For me, it hasn't been one long period of mourning, but rather many little things - missing calling her every Sunday, the lovely way she looked at me, her teaching me how to make everything neat and beautiful. She threw nothing away; instead, she always found a clever way to reuse it. Listening to her stories about growing up in a small village where most inhabitants were her relatives, or my father's. Her coffee, ah, her coffee, how I miss it! Every time I visited her, she would be waiting for me at the front door, no sooner had I arrived she would say, “This time you are going to stay longer, aren't you?” I miss returning home; that's what she was to me - home.
My heart breaks when I think of her, and at the same time, I feel overwhelmed with joy when I see and hear the first signs of Spring, when I buy myself flowers, and have a cup of coffee on a silent misty morning; or when the warmth of the sun hits my face after a long winter, and my husband and I go for a walk in nature, or simply dance alone in the house. Joy and sorrow - maybe that's the only way to fully experience life.
‘Whispers – A Love Letter to My Mother’ is more than a photographic project; it is Regina’s way of holding on. Each image is a fragment of memory, a way of preserving presence in the face of absence. Through her portraits of her mother and visual narrative, she offers a meditation on love, grief, and the enduring tenderness of the mother-daughter bond.
For Regina, photography became a way to stay close — to see clearly, to listen deeply, to honor the small and sacred details of her mother’s final years. In capturing these moments, she wasn’t just documenting change; she was bearing witness to a life. To the silences. To the rituals. To the everyday grace that still lived in the corners of her mother’s world.
And though her mother is no longer here, Regina continues to feel her presence — in the scent of morning coffee, in the way sunlight fills a quiet room, in the tender ache of memory stirred by the seasons. Love, she has learned, does not vanish. It shifts. It settles into new shapes. It lives in gestures, in stories, in the spaces we return to when we long for home.
This project is both deeply personal and quietly universal. On Mother’s Day, ‘Whispers’ invites us to pause and reflect on the women who raised us, shaped us, and loved us — often in ways that went unnoticed. It is a moment to remember, to honor, and perhaps, to see our mothers with new eyes. ‘Whispers’ is a tribute, a farewell, and a gentle reminder that even in loss, a mother’s love continues to speak — softly, steadily, like a whisper.
Throughout the years, Regina has expanded her photographic perspective and refined her craft through numerous workshops and participation in online photo salons. She has sought guidance from distinguished photographers such as Teresa Freitas, Dara Scully, and Oliver Mayhall at Domestika, Alec Soth and Joel Meyerowitz at Magnum Photos, as well as other renowned instructors like Laura Valenti, Leah Zawadzki, Roxanne Bryant, Deb Schwedhelm, Anita Perminova, and Jen Bilodeau. She has also worked with Aran Goyoaga in Portugal and Béa Peltre in England. These experiences have enriched her artistic vision and deepened her understanding of the power of photography as a medium for storytelling.
Regina has also used her photographic skills in volunteer work for non-profit organizations, which has further connected her craft to meaningful causes. Her work has been featured in notable publications, including a 2024 creative collaboration with Docu Magazine and Blurb Books, and as a selected contributor in C2H Photography Magazine in 2022 and 2021. She was also featured in Visual Voices Magazine in 2022, where her photo essays were highlighted alongside the work of 12 other photographers. Additionally, her photographs appeared in Fine Gardening Magazine in 2020, showcasing a wildlife-friendly garden in Connecticut.
Her dedication and talent have been recognized with accolades, including Second Place for the ‘Whispers Project’ in 2022’s Book of the Month and Third Place for ‘5 Blocks from Home’ in the 2020 James Maher Photography online competition. Regina’s work continues to evolve as she captures the complexities of life through her lens, offering both intimate and universal perspectives on the world around her.
As ‘Whispers’ comes to a close, the silence it leaves behind lingers — soft, familiar, and full of memory. In honoring her mother, Regina found herself returning to a deeper question that lives quietly within so many of us: “What is home? Is it a place, a person, a moment in time — or something we carry inside, shaped by love, loss, and the passage of time?”
For a further look into Regina’s world of visual storytelling, follow the link and engage more of her inspirational photography. Learn more about her process and her approach to creating photography.
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