Hi, I'm Margaret Barr from San Francisco, and here's my story. You can never really see inside someone's heart. At a solar print workshop last year, I created a print I called Shattered Glass, Active Hope, in the wake of my adult child's estrangement. What emerged during that time was my interstate, a record of loss and grief, colored with hope. As I was creating this art box, I was thinking of the importance of connection, how loss has shaped me, and how I find meaning. I grew up in a large family. When I was five, we moved to North Africa for my formative years. Many Europeans lived in our community as well. The world seemed huge and wonderful. Different cultures and people interested me. It all felt natural. My large family would become my stable community. On returning to the US, I was culturally un-American. It was awkward feeling to be so different, but I learned to be flexible. Our summers were spent in Maine, which I loved for its natural beauty. It became the most consistent place in my life. After college, my work took me to the many countries in Asia, Europe, and South America. For 10 years, I would travel this way.The world was exciting, and I loved working with other cultures, hearing their stories, making friends and connections in an ever-wider web. I did tire of always breaking community bonds, even as I gained so much, I decided to settle down. BeforeI married tragedy struck my family, I lost my pregnant younger sister in a car accident. I learned a grief I had never known. I was 34 and devastated as was my family. It was a terrible year of mourning. We began to unravel as a unit. But I remember the day I felt joy again. My husband and I moved to San Francisco to start our lives together and my parents retired to Maine. Their home became the place my siblings and I shared our lives and our children with each other. We had that home for 30 years. There were difficult things in this large family as well. My brother was abused in a prep seminary boarding school. It broke our family further. My brother cut off ties with our family. His children would never know their grandparents. He and I reconciled for a while. But many aunts and uncles and cousins did not. For his children and the cousins in particular, this was a hard disconnection. The walls put up as protection were very high. He in turn lost connection with his youngest child. What is lost for children's generation when estrangement is never reconciled. Who gets to have a voice? How painful is estrangement as it circles back around? In the years that followed, I lost my husband to a brain tumor. Eight months after I lost my dad, then my mother died and we sold the house in Maine. It's no longer a gathering place. My adult child left for Australia during COVID and we are now estranged. Shattered glass speaks to the difficult an ambiguous grief of estrangement. Active hope is the light in my heart that keeps me going.