Mother Teresa (1910-1997)
Filed under the name Teresa · July 29, 2026
There's a kind of composition where everything in the frame points toward one small figure doing something enormous, and that's how I keep picturing Mother Teresa's life — the wide, chaotic canvas of Kolkata, and then this one deliberate line of care running straight through the middle of it. She founded the Missionaries of Charity to look after the poor and the dying, work that eventually earned her the Nobel Peace Prize, though I get the sense the prize was never really the point for her. My mother crossed an ocean as a refugee with nothing but what she could carry, and there's something about devoting your whole life to people who have even less than that which I can't read about with any professional distance. Maybe it's the sleep deprivation talking, or maybe it's just that becoming a mother rewired how I read every story about care and sacrifice, but I keep thinking about all the unglamorous, repetitive labor that must have filled her actual days, work no one photographs, the kind that still holds the whole composition together.