When he was just 38, my father committed suicide in the home we shared together.

He shot himself in the head in the middle of the night while I slept in the next room.

Even though he had attempted it 6 months prior, I never dreamed he would attempt it again. And succeed.

So even though it shouldn’t have, to my young teenage brain, it felt shocking and unjust and blindsiding. It was overwhelming and traumatic and I suffered through a potent kind of despair long after his death desperately yearning for a chance at closure. Sometimes I would dream of him. He and I standing in a blank white space, on a white platform floating in nothingness. Absolutely nothing or no one around us. Just the two of us, and he would be talking to me, trying to comfort me and put me at ease.

I haven’t had one of those dreams in a very long time but I still wonder if those weren’t dreams at all. I still wonder if that was him communicating with me, trying earnestly to settle my heart.

This was a life defining event for me. A line of demarcation of a life before and after. A life with a dad and a life without. A life in which tragic deaths were something that happened to others and a life in which they happened to my immediate family. All illusions and preconceptions absolutely shattered.

A while after he died, though, my mom stumbled on a spiral-bound notebook, a journal he had left behind, shoved into the very back of a lower cabinet of our TV console. It was a journal he had been keeping for about a year that documented his suffering and struggles of the previous year - up until the very end. And in it, he had told me goodbye.

I would later scan the pages and turn his journal into a real book. It was heartbreaking and arduous but it was also cathartic and healing.

On a subconscious level since this event, I think I have always known I want to help bring this kind of peace to others whenever possible. Whether I’m working directly with the dying individual or with their family after they’ve passed, I believe the opportunity to create something beautiful or meaningful is never really gone.

I am an artist but I am also an INELDA-trained End of Life Doula with an emphasis in meaning and legacy work. I believe we all feel pulled to leave something behind of ourselves for our loved ones; A photo album, a journal, an original piece of art, an audio or written memoir, a scholarship or charitable fund, letters, an event, a film —whatever you might feel is calling to you, I would love to help you bring it to life.