Mara Hoffman and LaTonya Yvette in conversation.
Spring 2025
Ending Cycles
#Grief has become an all-too-common statement. Over the last few years in particular, mass expressions of grief on social platforms – via selfie videos of people crying, not to mention the endless news cycles – have made us increasingly aware that grief not only surrounds us but has the potential to collectively swallow us whole. Yet, despite this overexposure, an individual’s experience of grief often drowns in the echoes. I often fear we’ve lost the plot with regards to grief’s private purpose, and the natural, cyclical course it takes.
In her celebrated 2022 book, Grief is Love, grief expert Marissa Renee Lee writes about the subsequent loss of her mother, her cousin, and a pregnancy: “I thought it was normal to feel sad for perhaps the first few weeks. I didn't know it was normal to feel sad on and off for years, for what feels like it will be for the rest of my life.” Nearly three years after Lee’s work, my third book, Stand In My Window, was published and it, too, begins with grief. “When people pass away, I say to my children, May their memory be a blessing.” My book isn’t about loss in a prescriptive sense. I wrote it during the loss of a home, which was hard to dissect and place within #Grief. However, the loss brought up other deaths. Like Lee, I too have experienced late-term pregnancy loss and the death of a parent (my father). Private grief, I have learned, has a cyclical way of returning. It simply can't be felt or completed within a hashtag.
That same year, my friend, the designer, Mara Hoffman, made the decision to close her namesake brand of twenty-four years. She celebrated with a big sale, a eulogy. A week later, her father suddenly passed away. I have known Mara since the start of my career, and with that, maybe seventy percent or so into hers as a designer. There are many gaps between our connectedness, but none of which do not bridge at our urging. When I began to plan my book’s press, I was gobsmacked by the additional grief of letting the book go. Mara was navigating the world without her brand and her father. As winter transitioned into spring, we set out to compare notes on the cycles of grief. We were no longer the artists we once were. For perhaps the first time in our adult lives, we were simply existing.
(this conversation has been edited for clarity)
LY: I suppose my question to you is, where are you in the cycle of grief?
MH: I think I'm still in the process of completion, a kind of liminal state. And what I really want to say is that it's an exquisite place. I keep calling it the in-between. What I've realized from going through such a public ending, one where I felt like so many people were with me because they've been part of my journey for so long, is that they feel a sense of involvement in the ending.
The first question that I'm asked is, what's next? It’s been so interesting to examine where that question comes from, where all of our urgency for the next iteration comes from. Or the panic of not knowing where to plug into next. Because if we're not producing, if we're not actively outputting, who are we? What are we? It takes self-awareness to not get confused when everyone is asking, what are you going to do next? I bet you're going somewhere else.
And for me, it's like, oh my God, this is where we're not well because we are so afraid of pulling our plugs out of the currency. I understand too, and I have to acknowledge that I get to sit deeply in the what is without panic-stricken finding what's next. That is a gift. It's a privilege.
LY: There’s this idea that there is some other moment beyond this. I think those who have been close to death can feel distinctly that this is the only moment. I'm intrigued by what happens if we allow ourselves to be constantly in the moment, to just be. Or if we allow people who read the work or who have watched you do something for twenty-four years move away from fear?
MH: It’s like an artichoke. There's another layer and there's another layer, and the center of it is just the most delicious part, but you still have to peel it. And just when you think you've peeled it all, there's another part of it.
Clearing, cleaning. It doesn't always feel good to clean one's system, but that's what I'm signed up for right now. I think this is a new frequency I'm in. I'm not selling people things anymore. It's a very different role to play at the end of every creative expression. Everything I did as an artist was like, find your way through the museum, and then go through the gift shop on your way out. I'm going to create this art and I'm going to channel my artistry into photography, into the clothing, into the women, into the words. My brand was such an exquisite vessel for that. I adored my brand. I loved her. We did this in partnership. We ended in partnership. But that vessel of my artistry was so contingent on a commercial exchange. And so in this in-between, I'm intrigued and inspired by the idea of what art I will make when I'm not asking the viewer to buy it. What do I create?
LY: Who am I?
MH: Who am I?
LY: For me the question is, what am I doing if I'm not doing it for a project, a bigger project that takes me two, or three years, and I’m defined by it.
MH: The machine isn't set up to allow us as artists and creators to rest. The most essential ingredient to our sustained creativity and contribution is time away and rest. And really, this is such a moment where I'm coming to all these discoveries. I'm like, wow, when the fuck did that happen? Capitalism really fucked us up. And fucked over the artists in such a way.
Since we’re talking about cycles, when I think about pace and seasonality, the fashion cycle became one of my grievances. The people are bored and it has to be new and you’ve got to do it again. And it was like, what is it? Are we going to wake up from the stream? We are starving. We are starving to death because we're eating stuff. If we were eating slowly and nourishing ourselves, we would not be hungry all the time.
LY: For the last four months, for obvious reasons – the political climate – it has felt like I had spikes on my skin, in the sense that I couldn't be out in the world. I just couldn't handle it. Now instead of saying I can't handle it, I say, I’m just tender.
MH: You probably have spent your life tending to others' tenderness.
LY: Yes, and how do I take care of myself if I remove all of those strings and ties and relationships?
MH: When I closed my business, I came into work on a Monday and I was like, spring's our last collection. They were like, there she is. We got it. We got you. The day after I made the announcement to close the business, my dad fell and hit his head…
I made the announcement, he fell, and I went to Buffalo. Then he dies five days later. That week, everyone’s sending their eulogies of Mara Hoffmann the brand, and it felt like it was my own funeral. I was watching that end, and then sitting with my father in his physical ending, as he was making his own transition.
The interesting thing was when we were in the ICU. The motto of the ICU is To Keep Alive At Every Cost. God bless the ICU people because their drug is to keep life going. But then my sister and I made the decision to move him to hospice—which was like, wow, to make that decision for your parents—we're going to transition into death now.
In hospice they say, let's make this as comfortable, beautiful, and dignified as possible. Let’s embrace death and do it with grace and love. And so when you look at these two floors of a hospital, and here I had just exited the ICU of my business, then when I released it, I entered the hospice with it. It was beautiful.
I should note. All of the nurses in the ICU were white—and there was this frenetic energy to pump it, keep it alive. All of my father's nurses in hospice were Black women.
I think about the energy of what we're doing here and where it comes from and where this idea of capitalism derives from, and then the women that are capable of holding death, transition, the earth-rooted connectedness, and so many parts that got them there that were never their choice or their preference. Those are the women that can walk in the room and look at a human being and say, "Three more hours."
LY: Here we are. I didn't grow up deep in the church, but my grandmother was a devout Christian. There was/is this understanding that death is part of living from the very beginning. There’s that saying, "Born from the soil and to the soil we must return." It reminds me that this whole thing is just a process— a bridge between the two... the beginning and the end. And if we're not paying attention, we will lose it.
MH: We lose the in-between. Then the big part of it is like, hey, how are you dying in this life? And if you're not dying, I'm sorry. If you want to live this life, then you better start dying.
LY: We're always dying.
MH: We're always dying. Then we just get better at it, we do it more gracefully.
LY: As Ram Das said, “Either you do it like it's a big weight on you, or you do it as part of the dance.”
MH: Endings, endings, endings.
LY: Endings.
STORY CREDITS
PHOTOGRAPHY Mara Hoffman, MODEL LaTonya Yvette, MODEL Mara Hoffman
Read more stories
