Father

I made this painting during one of the most significant transitions of my life. My father has always been one of my biggest supporters, protectors, and caregivers. He was someone I could depend on and someone who helped shape the person I became. When he underwent intensive heart surgery and experienced several strokes during the procedure, he was left paralyzed. Everything about our relationship and our lives changed.

This painting became a way for me to confront the complicated grief that comes with losing someone who is still here. I was grieving the father I had always known while simultaneously learning how to accept and love the person he had become. There was no clear moment of goodbye, so I created one through the painting.

For me, this work is a goodbye to the version of my father that I knew, but it is not a goodbye to my father himself. It is an acknowledgment that our relationship had entered a new chapter and that I needed to make space for the person he was becoming.

Our roles had been reversed. The person who had spent so much of his life caring for me now needed me to become his caregiver. I had to confront becoming a provider, an advocate, and a source of support for someone who had always been that person for me. That reversal forced me to reconsider what it means to care for someone and what it means to be a daughter.

The painting exists somewhere between mourning and acceptance. It is about the loss of familiarity, the fear of change, and the love that remains even when a relationship no longer looks the way it once did. Creating it gave me a space to grieve without treating my father as though he were gone. It allowed me to say goodbye to the life we had while making room for the life we have now.