Care House

My culture’s available ceremonies for death had been spent (funeral, memorial service, paying medical bills, ordering estate issues) but I was still mourning.
So I kept compulsively returning to the house I grew up in, completing invented rituals.

The responsible processing work I did as daughter- of items, memories, and histories, was unseparate from the creative processing work I did as artist, was unseparate from the physical and emotional processing work I did as griever.

But, because I was the caregiver but not the executor, most of the what I got done I did under cover of “daughter.”

This included opening up the home to visitors. I was seriously lonely in not having enough ceremonies for my grief process, and serious about sharing what had come through. For a month in the sliver between it’s owner’s passing and when the house was sold, you could contact me to schedule getting a key from a lockbox code and then walk through the house alone.

It began with invited friends and art people, but spread to hospice people, medical professionals, and people who had had similar experiences.

I needed to give my mother and myself as a child a presence in this space. It turned out holding their space gave a place for many more people’s people. And care- forms of care outside of what the medical industrial complex provides.

It was an intimate story about parting with a parent and a home, but also the foreclosure crisis in a massive petrochemical hub with the worlds largest medical center. The house was subsequently flipped 3x.