WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY “OBJECTS-OF-GRIEF”? 

Here’s something I wrote it. Maybe this will help explain:

When someone dies, we often fill the cratered spaces that remain with the objects they left behind.  Anxious to hold onto some piece of that person, their objects become a portal, a proxy, an inscrutable universe of alternate access.  Their objects act as an anchor, holding some small part of them here, while the rest of them inevitably and undeniably recedes.   

These objects get tucked into our closets, perched on our shelves, or carried along in the bottom of our jacket pockets.  To most, these objects are unremarkable. Few know the world of memory and affect attached to the small wooden butterfly, the beat-up metal case, or the old sweatshirt spotted with paint.  

Like these objects, our grief also gets tucked away into the dark corners and private recesses of our lives.  We return to work and move through our day with seeming ease, just like normal. But one hand remains tucked in that pocket, where we silently thumb our grief all day long, mindlessly turning it over, feeling grief’s sharp edges scrape against our fingertips.  


WHAT IS ULTRASONIC FREQUENCY?

Ultrasonic frequency is a range of sound that is above what humans can hear or detect.   It is inaudible to humans.  

BUT WHAT’S THE POINT OF RECORDING MESSAGES THAT NO ONE CAN HEAR? 

That’s a great question.  To make us feel better maybe? After my Dad died, I really wanted a phone that could what the phone in Part I does.  I wanted to be able to talk to him, to say things to him at any moment. I wanted the things I said to play on an endless loop through a loudspeaker attached to my roof.  I wanted it to be very loud—but also inaudible. I didn’t think he would hear it necessarily, but the idea of it made me feel better.  


WAIT.  THERE’S ALL THIS STUFF IN HERE ABOUT “ABSENCE AS PRESENCE” AND TRYING TO RELATE TO WHAT WE CAN’T SEE OR HEAR.  IS THIS SUPPOSED TO BE A METAPHOR FOR LIFE AFTER DEATH?

No.  (I mean, I don’t intend it as that. But if that helps you, great.)  For me, it’s about grappling with what’s not known and can’t be detected.  And it’s about the way grief can rupture reason--in ways that are generative, creative, non-normative.  It’s not about defining or naming or knowing or saying what “is” It’s really about being here in the not-knowing.


HUH? SAY MORE.

Ok, when my brother died, I was suddenly thrust into grief without any solid belief about what happens after death. Frankly, I just hadn’t given it much thought. Suddenly, I was faced with the intense existential questioning that comes with grief and with a profound need to understand what happened to him. Yet, I had no narrative or language to hold any of it. I discovered that I couldn’t metabolize the idea that there was nothing left, that he was no more, that death was a full stop. And I also couldn’t convince myself that he was still here, that he continued on or was accessible to me in any way. I couldn’t believe either thing and was stuck between these two irreconcilable and contradictory ideas. And so I’ve taken refuge in parallel contradictions in the material world and in our lived experience, things that lie beyond what our senses can detect--like ultrasonic sound, electromagnetic radiation, dark matter, and radio waves--things are very much here and also not here.