My father died in the summer of 2021 after a long decline that saw his mind fall away piece by piece. It was awful to be part of & also tender. His guarded philosopher heart lost some of its armour in those last months, and he was able, as his being came to a close, to say & show more brightly how he loved us, who loved him.
I learned walking from my father. One of our weekends with him, I was maybe 12 & my brother 10, we drove to the Mount Baker Wilderness for a hike. I’ve never in my adult sojourns seen the stony valley among talus slopes that are my one visual memory of that day. It was my first time in a wilderness I’ve become intimate with as a grown man. I feel its slopes, their skins of hellebore & blueberry, as my own eyes.
I hiked there often the summer he died. Sometimes he walked with me. Then I would say to him, “you can’t walk down the hall anymore, but you can walk with me.” Then I wasn’t myself walking, or my father walking, I was me walking him. I felt his presence on my shoulders – I can feel it now too – about the weight of a feather.
Undone will be a graphic novella that walks with my father in his first days among the dead. I take photographs of the Mount Baker Wilderness, drain them of colour with GIMP’s threshold tool, and arrange them in panels. It’s visual poetry that draws on the formal conventions of what Will Eisner called sequential art and that works in a space more recently described as poetry comics.
In giving the panels their proportions, I’ve tried to follow the golden spiral, to honour a man most mathematical. If I’ve failed at that, and come up with something defective yet worthy anyway, that captures something about our complex & difficult loving-distant father-son bond.
The Art of Compost 