In the Absence of Days
2022
After my father’s sudden death, I read voraciously about the five stages of grief, desperate to cope with the staggering tragedy - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, finally, acceptance. But my mourning didn’t follow this well-ordered model. My prolonged grief after the death of my father was only compounded by further loss over time - the death of a close friend in his twenties, my father-in-law in his fifties, my best friend in her thirties.
These images consider the overwhelming nature of irreconcilable loss and living in the midst of absence. Paralleling the stages of grief, they are photographs representative of this nonlinear process. While there is beauty in each day, the loss still lingers, existing in the margins of ordinary moments, until one day the absence of those we’ve lost is somehow tolerable.