My Dad was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer eight years ago. He passed away in March.

Arguably, we had time to adjust — but we didn’t. Not really. How do you adjust to this kind of sentence? We lived in a space of anticipatory grief every day, never knowing when his last year, month, week, or day would come. And now we are here, and he is gone.

I wanted to process everything somehow. Naturally, I thought it would be through art, but the module I was studying at the time fortuitously aligned with my thoughts around participatory community arts. I found myself going down a rabbit hole, researching how different cultures prepare for death and the rituals they use to honour and remember the deceased.

I recognised keenly that, within Jamaican tradition, we have a Nine Night, but not necessarily practices deeply embedded in ongoing remembrance. I began asking myself: what could I learn from other cultures without appropriating them?

Here, you will see a workshop I facilitated with my family in an attempt to have ongoing meaningful dialogue, alongside the design work I created for my Dad’s funeral.