On loss, estrangement and the death of a brilliant man

“Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.” — L.M. Montgomery

My father died this week. I didn’t know him as I should have – my parents split when I was seven, when we left Mexico and came to Ireland, so contact over the years was spotty, especially pre-internet.

He was a circus performer; a talented trapeze artist, wonderful clown, as well as a veteran and a photographer. He was truly passionate about the art of circus, and its ability to bring lightness and joy.

Though I only spent my earliest years with him, his influence has rippled through my life. As Ari approached the age I was when I left Mexico, thinking about those years has felt like touching a tender bruise you had forgotten was there.

There hasn't been a major life milestone when I haven't thought about him. Graduating college, landing my first paid photography gig, getting married, the birth of my babes. The thoughts weren’t always positive - often they were bittersweet, laced with sadness, anger or disappointment at his absence.

So the loss is a strange one; I feel like I’m grieving twice, once for him and again for all that was lost over the years. For the father I very much had, for the seeds he planted but didn’t see grow, for two kids who will never know their granddad.

This post itself feels woefully thin on details, a reminder of how little I know, unable to come close to capturing the wholeness of the man he was.

We had very few meaningful conversations over the years, but one of the longer ones was about photography. Looking back, it seems little coincidence that I became a photographer; I remember him holding a camera often and grew up looking at many of his photos in our family albums; they were at times the only real connection I had to him.

The day after he died, I received a package from the wonderful Kristen Jensen at Nine Bean Rows containing The Kai Cookbook, the first cookbook I have photographed. I am so proud of this work, and I know he would have been too.

When he was 17, he bought his first camera. It was a "Snap Shooter" – a fixed lens, cartridge film flash camera. And when he was in the Infantry as a US Marine, serving in the military in Japan, he bought his first professional camera; a 35mm Pentax SLR with two lenses, a 50mm and a 200mm telephoto. In 1974, he learned how to develop film rolls and how to print in black and white. When he settled in the US, he took a correspondence course from the New York Institute of Professional Photography and organised circus-themed photography exhibitions. “Así es que podemos platicar bastante de fotografía. Técnica y Arte,” he wrote. Sadly, we never did. The loss I have carried all these years has multiplied tenfold, but the few memories I have are precious ones, and I’m grateful for them all.