Tree of Hope, Remain

By Kira Santana

/ Nonfiction /

In the rainy blitz of a March afternoon, I walk into The Museum of Modern Art in Midtown, Manhattan, with my blue wounds and my leather boots full of grief. A new exhibit, “Frida and Diego: The Last Dream,” has just opened, and my heart thrashes in my chest like a wild infant, hoping that a face-to-face with Frida Kahlo’s art can somehow return me to myself. In the dead cold of winter, I become very quiet and mistake my loneliness for the suspension of my maxilla and mandible bones. 

I moved to this city two years ago, and it has held me through inexplicable agony, through periods of healing and recovery and tremendous setbacks. My apartment is only a few blocks away from the hospital where I had my entire face spatchcocked like a chicken—a joke I often make to dispel the tension around my decision to have major jaw surgery in pursuit of a better, less painful life. I trade a lifetime of migraines and obstructed airways for six titanium plates and thirty-eight Stryker screws drilled into my skull. A surgery meant to save my life ended up killing any sense of self or familiarity. With a new appearance, I became someone else. The organ played a funeral march as the bovie knives, bone forceps and osteotomes rearranged my face and left it swollen and water-logged. 

The mirror offered heinous sights. A bruise’s shadow was almost rot. Oozing blood and frail stitches. Sometimes, I wondered if I would know a beautiful thing if I saw it. I had annihilated, destroyed myself. I woke up from surgery on a Thursday afternoon in July and realized, despite the horrible shriek lodged in my throat and the earth-shattering pain in my head, that I would live—and I was not so sure that I could.

“Frida and Diego: The Last Dream,” timed with the New York Metropolitan Opera’s premiere of “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego” (“The Last Dream of Frida and Diego”), runs from March 21 through September 12, 2026. The opera, composed by Gabriela Lena Frank and Nilo Cruz, imagines Frida returning from the underworld on Día de los Muertos to reunite with her husband, Diego Rivera. Together, they revisit their lives together, their betrayals, their art. The piece is part theater, part altar, part afterlife. At MoMA, the exhibition’s entrance feels almost withheld. 

At first, there is a larger-than-life photograph of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and then, with a turn of a corner, you enter the gallery itself, where the light shifts, dims, concentrates. The air is cool and faintly chemical, kept at a regulated temperature that keeps paintings preserved and bodies alert. I hear the soft, rhythmic sounds of footsteps on the polished floor, the low murmur of people speaking in half-voices. The heaviness of sound would disrupt what is already fragile here. I enter the gallery with my breath held. I stand just inside the threshold longer than I expect to, my heart beating through my throat, my vision blurring as the tears push themselves forward. The walls are reminiscent of Frida’s childhood home, Casa Rojo, painted in varying and muted colors of clay and terracotta. They absorb the light rather than reflecting it. 

My gait is slow, methodical. I feel the heat enter my cheeks, awash in warm, red light.

Frida’s painting, “Tree of Hope (Remain Strong), 1946” is positioned so that you encounter it immediately, though it does not announce itself through size. Usually kept in a private collection, the self-portrait is smaller than I imagined, and yet it seems to expand outward, pulling me in by its irresistible tendrils. Under a sky split between day and night and the sun and the moon occupying the same horizon, two versions of Frida appear within a barren landscape. One lies with her body turned away from us on a hospital trolley, her back exposed, surgical incisions still open and bleeding, the skin parted just enough to suggest that it could possibly open further; the other is seated upright, dressed in a red Tehuana dress, holding a pink orthopedic corset in one hand and a flag in the other. There is a text inscribed on the flag in neat, cursive handwriting, “Árbol de la esperanza, mantente firme.”

Tree of hope, remain strong.

The words reach me as instruction, as a plea, written in crimson. The tip of the flagpole resembles a surgical instrument dipped in blood. The ground below is cracked open by fissures that echo the wounds in her body.

Remain strong.

I scan the painting for the tree, searching the barren landscape, the sharp cliff-sides, the empty horizon, the dark mountains, but cannot find it. The knowing tilt of the seated Frida’s head arranges my memories in time and space. I am back in an empty hospital on E. 69^th, and it is the middle of the night. I pray to the overhead fluorescent lights. I hit the call-button on the side of my bed. I wait for hours. I bleed. The nurses neglect it. I choke as it fills my mouth. I wonder if I will die. I don’t know if it is a curse or a hoax or a dead of the heart. 

In the morning, the nurses on the ward guide me with my IV pole and billowing hospital gown down long, cold hallways. The walls are solely decorated with framed paintings and pictures of dead trees, leafless and stripped down to their ribs. Bare, gray, forlorn, these trees had become unrecognizable, too. There is no hope here. I search the walls for any sign of life, for green leaves to match my withering, little green heart, but there isn’t even a sliver. I return to Frida and something in me understands her differently. 

The body is the tree. The incisions are the rings. To be taken apart is just as important as being put together.

When Frida Kahlo was eighteen years old, a bus collided with the streetcar she was riding and drove a steel handrail through her pelvis, shattering her spine, fracturing her ribs, breaking her foot and dislocating her shoulder. Her body was not only injured, it was reorganized by force. Her accident was not followed by the finality of recovery but a lifetime of interventions. Over thirty-five operations, many of them on her spine, and each were an attempt to heal what was not fully healable. Metal supports. Bone grafts. Plaster and steel corsets that encased her torso and held her upright when her body could not do it on its own. Bed-bound for months. Extended periods of painting with great difficulty or not painting at all. In 1946, when Frida painted “Tree of Hope (Remain Strong),” her physical state had deteriorated, and a spinal surgery was inevitable. 

She traveled to New York City to undergo an operation with Dr. Philip Wilson, one of the leading orthopedic surgeons of the time, who warned her that without intervention, she would quickly become paralyzed. The procedure lasted for hours, and afterwards, she was confined to her bed, unable to move, her body held in place by force and by hope in equal measure. She wrote in letters to friends and family back in Mexico that the pain was unbearable, that the first weeks were filled with “great suffering and tears,” and that she survived only with the help of medication and a will she couldn’t fully explain. 

Even then, she painted. She referred to “Tree of Hope (Remain Strong)” as “nothing but the result of the damned operation,” refusing to separate the work from the suffering that produced it. In the painting, the upright Frida does not erase the one who lies bleeding behind her. She witnesses her. She holds a knowing look in her eyes, almost as if to say, you will be surprised what you can come back from.

Frida has returned to this doubling over and over in her work. The suffering body and the surviving body are not sequential; they cannot exist without one another. She paints herself both as subject and observer, both inside the pain and outside it. Even in recovery, the body does not return to neutrality—it carries its lacerations forward, inscribed in scar tissue, in altered movement, in the chronic awareness of a health that might fail again.

At six years old, I begged my mom to take me to Mexico City so I could visit La Casa Azul (“The Blue House”), the Frida Kahlo Museum and her personal home in Coyoacán. I had grown a great affinity for her art and dreamed of seeing her tubes of oil paint, her paintbrushes, her tiled kitchen with the bright yellow dining furniture, her green window frames, her wooden canopy bed with a mirror mounted above it so she could paint and see herself while laying down, her lush garden, her wheelchair positioned in front of her easel. Even then, my body was already a problem I was trying to solve. With pain that I couldn’t explain, joints that slipped, fatigue that came too quickly, I lived for years with no diagnosis. It would take me until my mid-twenties for it to be understood as hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, years before I learned the language of connective tissue, fragility, chronicity. All I knew was that my body did not move through the world the way other bodies did. 

As a child growing up with chronic pain, Frida’s work gave me an outlet, a way into expressing and understanding pain when I did not yet have the words or language for it. Her art was a pathway into her pain, into her life, and thus, into my own.

When I had major facial reconstructive surgery at age twenty-four, I spent months bound to my sickbed. My mouth overflowed with blood. I was alone in my own blue house in the Connecticut countryside, returning once again to the Coyoacán of my childhood in my mind. I wished Frida and I could keep each other company. The summer pressed itself against the windows in pressurized pockets of humidity, and the house was quiet. 

I remember the weight of the blankets, freezing in the heat of early August, the way my body seemed to sink into the mattress as if it were trying to disappear into it, and the constant presence of the steel bowl beside me, cool and metallic, catching the blood and water I could not swallow nor spit out. My jaws were held together with rubber bands affixed to my teeth, and I moved through the days silently, unable to speak, and with rarely anyone to speak to, anyway. My words existed only through a text-to-voice app, through the simplified, unfocused typing of requests for painkillers or water. There was a loneliness in losing speech, albeit temporarily, a wall erected between other people and me. Death swirled on the tip of my tongue. All of my life consisted of waiting for it to get better. I had surgery nine more times.

The enamel of our teeth holds history, recording fevers, malnutrition, stress, and the interruptions of childhood, simply upon close inspection. Teeth are stronger than bone; they persist long after everything else has gone. My mouth has become an archive I did not know I was agreeing to keep. The tissue along my gum-line, the buccal mucosa, the tender places that have been cut open and stitched back together only to be reopened again, hold their own chronology. Sometimes I can still taste it. The metallic tang of blood, the numbness of healing tissue, the strange, almost plastic sensation of nerves that no longer feel like mine, the thick film of pus and bacteria covering my tongue. I will never fully feel my bottom lip again; I will never be silly and blow a raspberry or drink a beverage without the fear that it will spill down the front of my shirt, or kiss someone without anxiety. 

If teeth are tree rings, then my mouth is a cross-section that has been interrupted mid-life. Sliced through. Forced into a new pattern it does not recognize. There are moments when I run my tongue along the inside of my mouth and feel the unfamiliarity of it, the way my teeth meet each other now, their alignment unnerving in their foreignness. My history rewritten by someone else’s hands. My blood choked throat. My death-rattle jaws. My cadaver bone-grafts. My raw, lacerated tissues stitched with sutures.

I walk to the back of the gallery at the Frida and Diego exhibit and find a wooden canopy bed, painted a deep cobalt blue, the same shade as La Casa Azul. There is no mattress, no sheets. Only the bones of the bed remain. From the center of the bed, a blood-red tree emerges, its branches bare, rising up toward a mirror mounted above it. Below the bed, the similar, earthy terrain from “Tree of Hope (Remain Strong)” covers the floor. The mirror reflects this marvelous, sculptural tree back down into the bed, doubling it, creating a kind of infinite loop of grief and growth. 

I stand at the base of the tree for a long time and think about the months Frida spent confined in her own bed, her body immobilized, painting and using mirrors to see herself, translating the intangible pain into the physicality of art and paint. There is a special kind of intimacy in that arrangement, in being forced to face yourself not as you wish to be seen, but as you are when the body has been opened wide. I think, here it is. The tree of hope. El árbol de la esperanza. Even in the face of immense pain and destruction and death. 

“I do want to live,” Frida wrote in her diary in 1951, after a year in the hospital and seven more operations on her spine.

After my first jaw surgery, I began to view the bed as the site of both confinement and creation. In the waning of light, I laid there in stillness and silence, and imagined Frida in her own bed, painting through pain, finding some way to remain in relation to herself even as her body changed. I talked to her because I knew she would understand. I avoided mirrors as if they were hostile surfaces, as if looking too directly might confirm something I could not undo. And yet I also sought them out, in small, controlled moments: standing under the bathroom light at night, angling my face, trying to understand the geometry of it, the unfamiliar proportions, the swelling that distorted time as much as it did flesh. 

At what angle did I need to stand underneath the ceiling lights so I could become something lovable? At what distance did my face resolve into something whole?

An awaiting and waiting; now, it is happening again. My doctors have told me I may need another operation to remove the hardware in my upper jaw, as my body is seemingly deciding it to be intolerable. When I close my eyes, I feel the tissue being cut open again, the sudden rush of blood filling my mouth, the ice packs wrapped around my head, the small paper cups of water, the suction, the pressure, the all-encompassing quiet. 

I remember my trembling body on the operating table, the smell of antiseptic, the hands of nurses and anesthesiologists grabbing and prodding my chest all at once, fastening electrodes and needles and tubes. A swarm of flies to a decaying body. No one holds my hand. The hours flatten into one continuous stretch of waiting, counting time in doses of medication. The body forgets how to move forward and instead begins to circle. Worrying about overstaying my welcome, about making the people I love suffer with my suffering, about pushing them all away with my relentless ‘too-much-ness.’ But who am I going to lose, if in my worst moments, I was always alone? I rehearse pain before it arrives, as if preparation might lessen its force.

After ten surgeries in four years, I cannot imagine going through this again. To rip open the thin sutures along my gum-line, to reopen what has already fought so tirelessly to be sewn shut. The near-annihilation of the fractured self. I have heard people say to not borrow grief from the future. But I can already see the headlights approaching. I can hear the low, grumbling hum of a terror moving towards me, and I feel it already begin to take shape inside of my body. I walk back to Frida’s painting at the opening wall of the gallery. 

Like the body itself, a self-portrait is something both lived in and looked at. 

An irreconcilable splitting of self, where one part is inside the experience—blood, incision, breath—and the other stands just outside it, watching, registering, trying to make an image out of something that refuses to hold still. I am both the one on the table and the one observing her, both the opened body and the figure who must account for it later, trying to make sense of what it means to keep going—to remain hopeful when hope has gone. These selves hold hands across something I cannot name. The vein between them is thin. I do not know what happens if it breaks.

But Frida can name it. Hope. Frida painted herself as both the one who suffers and the one who insists on surviving. These two selves do not merge. They exist alongside each other, in tension, in contradiction. Pain does not replace you; it duplicates you. Remain strong does not feel like comfort to me. It feels like something that has been handed to us as both burden and expectation. Remain strong. Continue. Persist. 

The painting does not offer resolution, only coexistence. The opened body and the upright body occupy the same terrain, the same hour, the same sky divided between sun and moon. Healing and wounded do not take turns; they overlap, insist on being seen together in this confrontation of a life defined not by resolution but by the complexities of sickness and wounds that will never close.

The resilience narrative suggests that survival is a kind of triumph, that endurance itself is evidence of strength, but it rarely accounts for the cost of that endurance, the way it can hollow out the interior life until what remains is function without feeling. I have been praised for surviving, for handling what has happened to my body, what others would not want to survive, and each time I feel a quiet resistance rise in me, a refusal to let that be the only framework through which my life is understood. I do not want to be a testament to survival if survival means the continuous unstitching of the same pain. I do not want to be strong if strength requires me to disappear the parts of myself that are afraid, that are tired, that do not want to go back.

I step closer to the painting and notice the detail of the incisions; the way they are rendered with such specificity that they resist abstraction. They are not symbolic wounds. They are anatomical. They belong to a body that has been cut open and stitched back together and cut open again. I think about my own mouth in those terms, not as metaphor but as site: the buccal mucosa split and reapproximated, the sutures dissolving, the tissue knitting itself together only to be asked, again, to separate. Teeth as tree rings, yes, but also as fault lines, as records of intervention rather than time. 

What does it mean to live in a body that can never get better?

Turning back to the blue bed frame in the middle of the room, I notice how the tree insists on itself, growing out of the place where a body should be. Hope, not as something lush or overflowing, but as something skeletal, upright, enduring without promise of bloom. Standing here, I find myself less interested in strength than in the demand beneath it: to remain at all. To remain in a body that has been divided against itself. To remain in the space between the two Fridas, between the one who bleeds and the one who survives, without forcing them to resolve into something final, something clean.

I leave the museum slowly, ready to go home and spiral about my rotting face as my body adjusts again to the brightness of the city outside, the noise, the movement, the sense of other lives continuing uninterrupted. For a moment, I catch my reflection in the glass doors as I exit—my face still in its own process of becoming, still not fully familiar to me—and I think about how much of my life has been spent trying to arrive at a version of myself that feels healed, recognizable, complete. Frida’s painting does not offer that. It offers something else entirely: a way of existing in the split, in the ongoingness, in the fact that healing and harm can occupy the same body at the same time. 

I am still as sick as I have always been. But here, on a difficult day in New York City, Frida parts the branches and lets in the daylight.