Beginnings in Caregiving

Beginnings are rarely simple.

Finding My Way is the first drawing in the Holding Pattern series. I created it after my father returned home following a hospitalization that changed the structure of both of our lives. I was relieved that he had come home alive, but almost overnight I went from helping a capable parent with occasional needs to becoming his full-time caregiver.

We had thought we had more time before reaching that point.

My father had been living with serious health problems for much longer than I understood. By the time his physical needs became impossible to overlook, I was still navigating changes in my own life following cancer treatment in 2020. Suddenly, I had little opportunity to prepare for what caregiving would require. I had to begin learning while already doing it.

That is where Finding My Way began.

The title is quite literal. I didn't know what the path ahead would look like. There were medical needs to understand, new responsibilities to assume, and changes in my father's independence that both of us had to learn how to navigate.

At the same time, he was still my father. Caregiving changed our relationship, but I did not want his remaining life to become entirely about illness.

As we found our footing, that became increasingly important. We began thinking not only about what he needed medically, but also about what he still wanted to experience.

Eventually, that path took us from the city lights of his birthplace in New York to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Colorado and finally to the Pacific Coast. These places became part of our final chapter together, but none of that was visible to me when I first sat down to make Finding My Way.

At first, I was simply trying to figure out what came next.

Purple became the dominant color in the drawing. Color has developed its own vocabulary throughout my practice. Yellow often represents joy, blue peace, and green harmony. Purple has come to represent inspiration, sitting somewhere between the calm I associate with blue and the motivation I associate with red.

My spouse once described purple as “the color you use when you're trying to get shit done.”

He wasn't entirely wrong.

In Finding My Way, purple felt right for a period when I thought it could be separated. I needed enough calm to understand what was happening and enough forward motion to respond. There wasn't a complete plan. There was simply the next decision, followed by another.

Like the other drawings in Holding Pattern, I created Finding My Way on paper rather than the recycled polyester synthetic paper I usually use for my ink drawings. The paper absorbs the ink into its fibers, allowing the lines to spread and settle differently. Across the eight drawings, that shared material became part of the visual continuity of a series created through very different moments.

Finding My Way occupies the beginning.

It was made before I understood how caregiving would reshape my life, before my father's final decline, and before I knew that Holding Pattern would eventually become eight drawings documenting moments before, during, and after his death.

The eight originals are now mounted and framed together as a single work. Keeping them together feels important because none of these moments existed independently of the others. Finding My Way begins a path that can only be fully understood alongside what followed.

A Silent Goodbye (2024) - Nye Beach, Oregon

When I photographed A Silent Goodbye at Nye Beach, we had traveled a long way from those first uncertain days. My father had seen places he wanted to see, and we had accumulated experiences together that would not have existed had illness been allowed to define all of the time that remained.

Looking back at Finding My Way, I can see the beginning without pretending I knew the ending.

I didn't.

I was finding my way.

Salud y Vida, friends. — Ava