Tense? — Holding the Path

There came a point while caring for my father when I noticed something had changed. His appetite was fading, his words were becoming quieter, and his body was beginning a more visible decline. Until then, caregiving had developed its own rhythm. There were needs to meet, things to monitor, and decisions to make, and I had learned to move alongside them.

Then the rhythm began to falter.

That period became part of Tense?, one of the drawings in my Holding Pattern series.

I knew my father was dying. Knowing that did not mean I knew what his decline would look like or when something would change. There was a strange tension between preparing for what I understood was coming and continuing to respond to the person who was still there.

I could care for him. I could pay attention. I could make decisions as circumstances changed. What I could not do was stop what was happening.

The title came from that state of uncertainty. Tense? is not simply a description of being tense. The question mark matters. I was responding to a period in which I could feel circumstances changing without knowing precisely what the next change would require of me.

Like the other drawings in Holding Pattern, Tense? was created on paper rather than the recycled polyester synthetic paper I usually use for my ink work. Paper absorbs the ink into its fibers rather than allowing it to remain on the surface. That changes how the marks spread, intersect, and settle as I work.

In Tense?, those marks accumulate without completely resolving their tension. They move, intersect, and change direction. There is structure, but there is also instability.

Grief doesn't always wait for death to arrive. Sometimes, it starts long before the end.

And sometimes, it arrives without warning.

While I was caring for my father, I had missed an opportunity to see my friend Joni, a photographic portrait artist from New Zealand. There would be another chance, I thought. After my father died and I was finally able to begin thinking about making the trip, I reached out to her.

I learned that Joni had died in a car accident the day before.

There had been time to understand that my father was dying, even if there was no way to prepare completely for his absence. With Joni, there was no warning and no opportunity for one last visit. The future encounter I thought was still waiting for us simply wasn't there anymore.

The two losses were not the same, and Tense? was created from the experience of caring for my father rather than from Joni's death. But when I later wrote about the drawing, I was mourning them both. Their deaths had shown me two very different relationships between grief and time: one that had begun while someone I loved was still alive, and another that arrived after I believed there was still time left.

That distinction changed the way I understood Tense?. The drawing belongs to the period of waiting, when my father was still alive and I was still walking beside him. Its tension comes from knowing that something is approaching while having no control over when or how it will arrive.

That distinction also matters in Holding Pattern. The series was created across the period before, during, and after my father's death, rather than as a retrospective account of grief. Because of that, the drawings do not all look backward from the same place. Some were made while I was still waiting, still caring for him, and still responding to circumstances as they developed.

Tense? belongs to that part of the series.

Looking at the drawing now, I don't see an answer to what I was experiencing. I see evidence that I was present within it.

There was nothing I could do to change where my father's life was heading. Making the drawing allowed me to record something else: the tension of continuing to walk beside someone when I was beginning to understand that I could not follow him all the way.