Statement C. 2020: This is an incomplete, older record of the cemeteries I went to and the things I found there (complicated feelings, vestigial collective memories, increasingly subjective and factually inaccurate flashback to when this guy explained the foucaultian “cemetery-as-heterotopia” thing to me, reverberating over and over again in my head).

I’m not going to lie to you about my level of grave research sophistication. When I first started doing this, I did go to the Pasadena microfiche archives to look at one case in particular, but that was the only time when the gloves really came off.  The scientific procedure involves relentless Googling and disabling javascript to overcome the paywall on archived magazine articles. The special sauce is the mormon-run genealogy nonprofit, familysearch, where you can sometimes find a scanned death certificate. findagrave, where people compile and curate burial information as a form of “virtual cemetery experience”, is the cherry on top.

Below you will find second-person, conjectural re-tellings of the deceased’s final moments, and how they might have felt about it, filtered through my own greasy little lens. This content formed the basis of a zine and installation during my second year at art school.

The primary impetus for me to create work of this nature is out of a desire to unearth and reconfigure the unemotional circumstances gleaned from newspaper obituaries as well as other sources into a feeling that is once again palpable, and heightened in its somber itchiness. 

I am reticent about sharing my newer sauce. Hopefully I will have more to offer you soon.

All photos by me.




August 1986 

There are approximately twenty two seconds from the time the big thunderous something goes wrong until you are violently flung back to Earth from your little coach seat on the DC-9. You are a silly tousled black-haired cherub boy, shaken from a dreamless sleep by the sounds of metal on metal. This brief cacophony rattles through to the very core of who you are, who you could’ve been. Your parents look back at the seats where you and your older brother sit, and you see that your mother’s mouth is curling in a way that you wouldn’t have ever believed was possible. You were draped in the courtesy waxen airline blanket, but in an instant it is gone. This degree of frightened, dizzying tumult is completely foreign to you, but despite its strangeness you find it hard to be afraid. You don’t have any time to. The plane inverts completely, the whole world is upside down.

You are only seven years old, and know nothing of Terminal Control Airspace or the FAA or how vital horizontal stabilizers are to a controlled and maintained flight, but it doesn’t really matter now. Wailing, moribund flailing taut skin consciousness all around, the air is charged with the guttural panic of human projectiles who were not secured before the final spiral. Suddenly there is a fierce surge of hot psychic energy coursing through you, the hairs on your arm all prickly and sharp, but in this horrible weightless downward cascade there can be no outlet for it. You dimly realize that this is the final quarter-minute of your short life, with the ground waiting to embrace you and your family very shortly.




September 1965 

You are prescribed a tricyclic antidepressant, and are saved thusly from the psychological wreckage of your failed marriage to a small-time show business casanova. The medications steadily build a callus over the scorched, ruined parts of your brain, and you find it easier to pick up the best parts of your former selves and begin again. You place your 20 year old hydrocephalic daughter in an institution with an intent to strike it out on your own, and your face is a familiar one at the gym, at least before a minor injury to your foot. You will never be able to know it but, tiny pieces of fat from this hidden fractured part of you are the keys to your downfall. You feel a sharpness in your brain and chest, and it takes ahold of you completely, as if you were born to feel this and this alone.



June 1998 

The memories continually resurface during the trial, and eventually it all becomes too much for you to bear alone. Your death comes less than a year after you murdered your pregnant girlfriend with a bowie knife in a La Crescenta recreation park, and every night you are plagued by the guile you saw in her eyes, huge and innocent like a cow’s. You are found hanging from a metal bookshelf during a routine check at North County Correctional Facility in Saugus, CA.
You used a standard issue bedsheet, and did not leave a note. The trial is settled at last. Your epitaph describes you as a “man of tender heart and generous spirit, set free.”




July 1999 

Sometimes things don’t work out. Sometimes the credentialed swim instructor ratio is 70 to 1. Sometimes the chlorinated water floods into your mouth, and despite your valiant efforts to bob your head up and out of the water, you sink to the very bottom of the Hollywood High School pool without anyone noticing. Three to four breathless minutes enveloped in a kind of solitude that you have never known before, and never will know again. You are in a coma for six days before being declared brain-dead, and your tearful parents make the decision to donate your organs. Your radiant light is extinguished. We live to love you more each day.

Selected Epitaphs 

1977. What we keep in our memory is ours forever unchanged.

1986. En nuestro corazon. We love you always.

2014. Oh my! We love you.

1995. The Dutchman.

1973. Creative spirit.

1930. The call was sudden, the shock severe. We never thought his end was near. We who have lost can only tell, the pain of parting without farewell.

2015. Juntos para siempre, te amamos.

1991. We will not be sad, for you are with your loved ones who have waited all these years with God. We love and miss you darling. I will love you forever - Eldon.

1953. Our darling baby twins.

1926. Grandma.

No date. We loved you honey, but God loved you more.

1952. Rest in peaceful slumber.

1991. Beloved husband and grandfather.

1945. Sleep dear mother, take thy rest. God called you home. He thought it best.

1978. No man is indestructible, but some are irreplaceable.

No date. Papa and bab. Brother.

1947. The Lord is the keeper of little ones.

No date. It is the “Process of Life” that will survive and WE serve MERELY as a vehicle of this process.

2015. Precious little girl.

1947. Our little dream, for a little while.