In April 2022, my precious, beautiful, life-filled 17-year-old child died by suicide. After this devastating loss, I entered into the most overwhelming darkness. The world has cracked open and I have fallen in. How can I find myself? I am lost without you. The death of a child gives way to the death of the self. Who I was before my child died is gone. I am totally deconstructed. This is another layer of grieving. While at times disorienting and painful, I was sometimes able to tap into a feeling of possibility. I never once imagined that my child would die by suicide and that I would carry a loss like this. On the flip side, I asked myself who do I want to be now? What life can I imagine for myself that I never imagined was possible? There is freedom here.  

Six days after my child died I started writing letters to him. I wrote every day for two years.  I also started painting. Mourning through making art allowed me to hold a wider range of feeling that includes the capacity to experience exquisite joy that exists not in spite of my grief but because of it.

After three years in the underworld, I brought my writing and art together and created a performance piece about my journey of grieving my son. My partner Phoenix Song provided the musical accompaniment. Over a hundred people came to our home to witness three performances. At year four, Vicki Dello Joio joined as our director to shape the piece for the stage while Phoenix weaved in more of their story including their experiences as the supportive partner and the challenges of surviving prolonged grief in a family system.

After six months of rehearsals with our director, in May 2026 we debuted A Hundred Mothers Collecting the Bones to a sold-out audience at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley. Through a performance piece featuring theater, poetry, storytelling, and music, we show how we navigated the unimaginable to create this show as an offering of deep love, healing, and the transformation that becomes possible when we allow loss to reshape us into more authentic versions of ourselves.

This performance is for anyone carrying personal or collective loss. It invites us into a shared space of witnessing, where one story can hold the stories of many, and where our voices weave together to hold each other. At our performances we have a collective community altar where people bring a photo or object of whom or what they are grieving. As grief is expressed and honored, it can begin to move—within us and between us—opening the possibility of integration, meaning, and renewal.

This project comes from deep in our bones out to the world as an offering of honesty, authenticity, love, hope, and inspiration. We trust this work will continue to move and touch people as we look for more performance opportunities around the country (and world) in various theaters, conferences, and festivals. Ultimately, our vision is to help other bereaved parents tell their stories of heartbreak and profound healing onstage in collective performances.

“When we love deeply, we mourn deeply; extraordinary grief is an expression of extraordinary love. Grief and love mirror each other; one is not possible without the other.”
― Joanne Cacciatore, Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief