On January 2, 2021, my father passed away after a three-week battle with COVID-19. For some reason, I started writing a few days after he died, mainly as if I were writing letters or speaking to him (although as time passes I’m noticing that this is starting to change). I’ve been writing, collecting, and recording off and on since then, a personal way to process this madness. Sometimes daily, sometimes skipping days and weeks at a time. This is a living container to hold space for my own experience and process of loss and grief. There is no perfection, it is full of holes, I’ll go backwards and forwards, always keeping open the ability to return. It’s a space for survival. If there’s one truth I’m coming to terms with, regardless of my relationship with my father and all the ups and downs, is that his death has rewritten everything, changed every rule and assumption, in a shocking and violent way. I am working to recognize and accept the fact that in this moment, I’m not be able to separate this personal trauma from my life and work, and so I’m trying to embrace this so that I can continue to work towards being the best citizen and artist that I can be. Because to be honest, at the moment, I don’t know what else to do. This space will grow and shift with time, as grief apparently does.

There doesn’t seem to be too much public conversation yet around these stories or space for people to figure out how to reconcile their experiences over the past year with the staggering numbers of loss due to COVID that rise daily, exponentially. I am sharing this because maybe these personal and messy reflections, memories and stories, will help someone else, and if so, it’s more than worth it.

(All images below are links)