Ghosts in the Afterlife: The Final Drawing in Holding Pattern

A reflection on survival, grief, and the freedom to create art that doesn’t ask for permission.

I took these images during my last 4th of July with my dad in Washington, D.C. We visited museums, drank too-sweet cocktails, and watched fireworks together for the first—and last—time. I’m sharing them not to perform my grief, but to honor the joy we did have. This memory shaped “Ghosts in the Afterlife.”  It reminds me that I’ve survived—and I’m still creating.

Ghosts in the Afterlife was the final drawing I created for Holding Pattern, a series that grew out of caring for my father before, during, and after his death. By the time I made this piece, he had been aquamated. No more appointments to anticipate, decisions to make, or moments of care still waiting for me. What remained was memory.

These photographs were taken during the last Fourth of July I spent with my dad, in Washington, D.C. We visited museums, drank cocktails that were far too sweet, and watched fireworks together for the first and last time. I return to these images because they preserve something that can become difficult to hold onto after someone dies: the ordinary pleasure of having been together.

That memory became part of Ghosts in the Afterlife.

I created much of Holding Pattern in moments surrounding my father's care. The drawings were not a diary of what was happening, nor were they illustrations of individual events. They gave me somewhere to place what I was carrying when there was often nothing I could do except remain present. Ghosts in the Afterlife came from a different place. My father was gone, and the period of waiting that had shaped so much of the series was over. I was no longer making work from inside the uncertainty of what would happen next. I was looking back.

The drawing became a quiet farewell, but I don't think of it only as a work about death. When I look at it, I think about the person who existed before the loss: someone I knew imperfectly, loved while he was alive, spent time with, struggled with, forgave, and made memories with. Grief did not erase the complexity of that relationship, nor did it become the only way I wanted to remember him.

Finishing the drawing also meant finishing Holding Pattern. The series had accompanied me through a period when much of my life revolved around waiting, caregiving, uncertainty, and eventually loss. Completing the final work gave that period a boundary.

There is something strange about reaching the end of a body of work that developed alongside an experience you could not control. The circumstances end, but the experiences do not disappear with them. They become memories, and those memories continue changing as the distance from them grows.

That is part of what I see in Ghosts in the Afterlife. Not an attempt to resolve grief or make sense of death, but a record of what remains after someone's physical presence is gone.

The photographs from Washington and the drawing made years later are very different kinds of images, but they now exist together for me. One preserves a particular day with my father. The other holds something less tangible: the trace of having known him, lost him, and continued forward carrying the memory of both.

That is where Holding Pattern ends.