Everything/But is an image diary documenting the remnants of disaster — a film about vanishing, and the traces left behind. The film is also about mourning my mother. At the time of filming, my mother had recently died. As I stood in the wreckage of an abandoned house — dirty dishes in a rusted-out sink, clothes hanging limp in a closet, curtains torn and flapping — I thought about my mother; my mother whose life after 17 years of marriage was overturned by divorce; my mother who left West Texas with her 5 children and drove east for a new start. I mourned her being gone from me; I mourned not understanding her better when our family life was splintering apart; I mourned the “can do” persona that defined her and that shielded us, her children, and even herself, from what we had lost — love, stability and the societal mooring of being seen as a whole and “good” family — all of that as I stood on a Texas back road in the sweltering sun surrounded by the wreckage of another family’s life.