Turn the Page is a deeply personal project discussing the close care, and slow loss of my father to vascular dementia, our complicated relationship, and the lack of closure due to the–”allegedly”–disgustingly neglectful mishandling of over 80 cremains by the Heinz Funeral Home: resulting the in the permanent misplacement of my father’s cremains.

Inspired in part by Alison Bechtel’s Fun Home, but stemming from a need to process my feelings and derive some sort of closure, Turn the Page is a biographical/autobiographical search for identity and understanding through analyzing how generational trauma shaped and formed my dad and myself (along with my mother and sister). It’s a homage to a difficult balance of both loving a father who did his best, but recognizing his shortcomings. It’s about how little he was given to work with by an abusive mother who herself suffered terrible traumas from her white colonialist father during her childhood in the Philippines.

Essentially, Turn the Page is my attempt to deal with the loss of my fathers ashes, and the legacy of pain and trauma my family hopes to lay to rest with our generation. It is in a sense, turning the page, and closing this chapter in our family’s history.

This is a sample of a much larger work I am in the process of writing/illustrating.