Photos, Dying and Living: Kate Schutt’s “Square by Square”

Kate Schutt was with her mom, Katharine, when the doctor said the word cancer and everything changed forever. CT scan, de-bulking surgery, biopsy: Katharine’s ovarian cancer was a carcinosarcoma, deadlier than the carcinoma her sister had survived. The last chapter was written; they knew how the story would end. So mother and daughter talked. “I said, ‘We’re not mincing words about this,’” Kate told SevenPonds. “‘This is going to kill you — so how do you want to live your life?’ [My mom] looked me dead in the eyes and said, ‘I want to organize the goddamn family photos.’”

Kate Schutt’s song “Square by Square,” from her album “Bright Nowhere” (available on ArtistShare), shows her mom persevering in this labor of love in the face of her cancer, through box after box of photos between round after round of chemotherapy and radiation.

Matchstick legs of the wooden chair
Pulled up close to the table where
Pictures stacked up year by year
The trash can’s by my knee
I sit and sort if I feel okay
Keep a few, most I throw away
It’s a chore I meant to do someday
Well, someday came for me

Katharine had always been the family photographer, and there were many, many photos. But she wanted to see it through. “That was my mother in a nutshell, so pragmatic,” Kate says. “She [didn’t] want to leave anything for anyone else to clean up.”

Old friends, dead sisters
Neither here, nor there
Boxes and boxes of photographs
I’m gonna see this through
Square by square

Kate was there for it all. She paused her successful career as a singer-songwriter for five years to move back into her childhood home and become her mom’s full-time caregiver. On days when her mom felt up to it, Kate brought boxes of photographs to the kitchen table, and Katharine got to work. She looked at every picture, sometimes using one hand to hold up the other. Then she gave Kate instructions for what to do with the photos. “She’d say, ‘Send this one to my cousin,’” Kate says. “She used it as a way to connect with people.”

Katharine’s labor of love took years, but she completed it a few months before she died in 2015. Her family has copies of the photo albums she made.

Kate Schutt (right) became her mom’s primary caregiver for five years, until her mom’s death from ovarian cancer. Kate chronicles their shared journey through dying and living in the album “Bright Nowhere.”

Then Kate Schutt began her own labor of love. She started crafting “Bright Nowhere” — or “The Death Album,” as she first called it — from the fragments of songs she’d written over the years her mom was dying. “Bright Nowhere” seeks to be in music what memoirs like Christopher Hitchens’ “Mortality” are in literature: portraits of the real-time losing of a life.

“I wrote this music, obviously, for my mom and myself,” she says. But she also knew “it could help somebody who was feeling like I was feeling.” Seeing our own grief reflected back to us in books and movies, poetry or visual art can be a profound comfort. Kate wants us to hear that reflection in songs too.

Watch Kate Schutt’s “Square by Square” performance for Cancer Support Community Delaware below.