“GOD = LOVE!” collage

The “GOD = LOVE!” collage is a handmade work by Thomas Birdsey, created while Ma was undergoing treatment for metastatic cancer. Built from small household and craft materials and displayed in her kitchen, it gave Thomas a concrete way to respond to his mother’s illness; after her death, his wish to have it back made the collage part of the brothers’ first moments of mourning together.

Making and Display

As Ma lay in the hospital for scans, examinations, and cancer treatment, Thomas spent hours in the arts and crafts room at Three Rivers State Hospital’s Settle Building assembling, gluing, and shellacking a hodgepodge of nuts, washers, buttons, macaroni, and dried peas. The arrangement declared GOD = LOVE! It was one of the family’s separate, imperfect attempts to make things up to Ma during her illness.

Between hospital stays, Ma hung the collage on the kitchen wall. Its crowded assortment of glued objects seemed to the narrator to pulse like a living organism or molecules in a science film, an impression that unnerved him. The work thus occupied an uneasy place in the household: a declaration of love made from ordinary fragments, but one whose busy, animated appearance was difficult for him to look at.

Thomas’s Request After Ma’s Death

When Ray asked Thomas whether he had questions, Thomas asked whether Ma had suffered at the end and whether he could have his collage back. The two questions joined concern for Ma’s final experience with a request for the handmade object he had made during her illness. The collage was not incidental to his grief: it was something he wanted to reclaim on the morning she died.

The narrator stayed with Thomas, recognizing his need to be beside his twin on the morning of their mother’s death, and apologized to him. He then reached for Ma’s scrapbook, and the brothers looked through it together in silence. The account does not say whether Thomas received the collage, but his request establishes its continuing personal importance at this moment of loss.

Significance

The collage gives material form to a family response that otherwise remains difficult to articulate. Thomas’s long, practical work of assembling disparate pieces sits beside the stark declaration GOD = LOVE!, while Ma’s decision to hang it in the kitchen brings his gesture into the family’s shared space. After her death, the request to have it back marks a change in its role: what had been a gift displayed for Ma becomes an object Thomas wants returned to him.