blog: Pieces Of Us + holding space for grief
My dad had been sick a lot when I was a kid. We lived with a lot of medical debt. I watched my dad spend a summer relearning how to walk after major back surgery. My parents were constantly working trying to pay off medical debt. My family even spent a year long-distance after my dad moved for a new job and my mom stayed with my sister and I so we could finish the school year.
We left our home, our friends, everything we knew & loved for his promotion, a lower cost of living, and the promise of finally being together, healthy, and thriving. Within 2 years of this move my dad was gone.
He passed away when I was 12 years old. It was a an unexpected shock for my family: we found him on the couch. On the phone to 911, I had to talk my sobbing mother through performing CPR on my dad’s body.
I found the nature & abruptness of his death incredibly hard to accept, especially because he had seen his doctor less than 24 hours before who told him he was fine & sent him home despite his medical history.
After 7 years of malpractice litigation, it was confirmed that his passing was preventable but due to medical negligence informed by incentives of a profit-driven medical industry, he did not get the care he needed.
In the years after his passing, my grief mixed with an anger that I noticed everywhere around and within me. I felt my values at odds with the world in which I lived. I felt alone, lost and without a place. I needed a change.
For the whole of my childhood my father had worked for an airline and, after he passed away, his employer granted the members of my family with flight benefits. For me, I received these benefits to fly anywhere in the world for cheap/free until the age of 25. So I did.
I starting traveling abroad on my own when I was 16. I left the USA after finishing university when I was barely 22 and my life has never been the same.
I had always wanted to be an artist and a performer, and I was even accepted into a drama program after university, but I decided to decline the offer. I felt that I was not in a place emotionally or mentally that would lead anywhere good. And I felt that these flight benefits were a gift, what my dad left for me. More than that, it was something that made me feel close to him and it made me feel like I could actually extend the length of his life beyond the all too brief 42 years that he had been given.
I started working myself from place to place, starting in arts outreach & arts education, later getting involved in community service projects, and finally in disaster relief and international aid projects. I would often busk or sing at open mic nights along the way.
The more I sang and played music, the more I found myself in environments in which I was singing with people, sharing stories, and bringing communities together.
This work led me to an important conclusion: that art could save the world.
With this conviction, I earned myself a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship to study music in South Africa, where I met my partner, lived for five years, and got back into performing for theatre, film, & music before moving to London to train at LAMDA and to pursue this dream full-time.
My journey around the world and back to myself, one could say, was complete…..
Fast forward to spring 2023. About halfway through the rehearsal process for my latest show, PIECES OF US, I realised that this show, in essence, asks the audience to do what I spent those years traveling doing: to sit and be present to the grief of others and to listen to the stories of strangers with curiosity and compassion.
When I started writing PIECES OF US, it was a very different show, imbued with all of the anger and resentment of my 12 year old self. The show I had set out to make was called COLOSSUS (think DR. STRANGELOVE meets NETWORK with a televangelist as the main character).
But the more I wrote, the more characters started sneaking onto the page that had no place in the world of the show I thought I was creating. I started researching and their lives formed before my eyes.
There was no logic as to why this show was insisting on being made and the five characters that wanted to be heard. About halfway through the rehearsal process, my past work took on a new meaning.
In disaster relief and aid work, organisations typically provide essential survival supplies: food, medicine, and shelter. This work is valuable and important, so I don’t wish to diminish that. But, once those are provided, many organisations simply leave. People are left (sometimes in literal wreckage of a natural disaster or manmade conflict) to make meaning of what they’ve lost, often by themselves. No more help was coming. That is where I came in with music, storytelling, and fellowship.
I realised that in all my years of traveling, I was trying to give others what I had sorely needed: a community of people with whom we could hold space for each other’s grief with care & curiosity.
This show asks the audience whether we, as a society, focused on outcomes & productivity & profit, are able to create time & space for each others’ grief. More than that, it asks whether holding space for each other’s grief is necessary for our survival. It brought me comfort and new healing to know that I was now turning my grief into a piece of art that can hopefully help others.
I had often been very judgemental and unkind to myself for not committing to being an artist sooner, like my travels had been a waste of time or as if I had been procrastinating. But now, having made PIECES OF US, I realise that had I not had that time to recover and heal in the way that I had chosen to, I do not think I would have been capable of making a show like PIECES OF US.
I hope you find it as healing to watch as I’ve found it healing to make.
If you find yourself moved by this article and you want to be able to see or read the show, please consider booking a ticket to come see me in Edinburgh or, if you can’t be there in person, consider donating to my crowdfunder and you can claim a ticket to a video recording of a live performance or a signed copy of the script!