GOD = LOVE!

GOD = LOVE! is the declaration on a handmade collage Thomas Birdsey creates for Ma during her final illness. The words give a direct expression to love at a time when the family struggles, each in its own way, to make things up to her; the collage’s later return to Thomas makes it both a gift and a keepsake bound to her death.

The Collage and Its Making

While Ma is in the hospital undergoing scans, examinations, and cancer treatment, Thomas spends hours in the arts and crafts room at the Settle Building assembling the collage. Its crowded arrangement combines nuts, washers, buttons, macaroni, and dried peas, glued and shellacked together beneath the declaration GOD = LOVE! The message is plain, but its construction is painstaking and material: Thomas makes an object of many small pieces while the family confronts the irreversible damage of Ma’s illness.

Between hospital stays, Ma hangs the collage on the kitchen wall. To Dominick, its glued objects seem to pulse like an organism under a microscope or molecules in a science film, and the sight unnerves him. His reaction complicates the declaration’s reassuring simplicity: the collage offers a statement of love, yet its dense, strange appearance registers the anxiety surrounding Ma’s treatment and the family’s pain.

Family Gifts and Contrasts

The collage is one of three distinct projects through which the family tries to respond to Ma’s illness. Ray repairs her broken scrapbook, reinforcing its binding with cut aluminum strips and small bolts; Dominick plans an extensive remodel of her pink 1950s kitchen, including new walls, cabinets, and a center island. Thomas’s handmade declaration differs from these acts of repair and renovation: rather than restoring a damaged possession or changing a room, he creates something for Ma to display.

These efforts do not resolve the family’s grief, but they give it practical forms. The collage’s message makes love explicit, while the scrapbook repair and kitchen project express care through work on things Ma owns and uses. Their different materials and scales show each family member reaching for a way to act in the face of an illness none can undo.

Return at Ma’s Death

On the morning Ma dies, Ray asks Thomas whether he has any questions. Thomas asks whether Ma suffered at the end and whether he can have his GOD = LOVE! collage back. The two questions bring concern for Ma together with a request for the object he made for her: the collage has moved from a gift displayed in her kitchen to something Thomas wants to reclaim after her death.

Dominick stays with Thomas after Ray leaves, aware that he needs to be beside his twin on the morning of their mother’s death. In this setting, the collage’s declaration does not erase loss or provide an explanation for it. Its return instead gives Thomas a concrete link to Ma and to the care he tried to offer her, while its words remain a simple assertion against the family’s grief.