Laughing all the way to the grave is one of the ways I hope to look back on my life. Human nature is full of regrets, what-ifs, fear, and anxiety. But, strangely enough, traumatic experiences sometimes leave us with the opposite realization: that life is brief, fragile, and far less serious than we often feel.

This work explores the absurdism that can emerge from grief and the strange clarity that reminds us life is meant to be lived by the living. It also reflects the idea of memento mori, a concept that I love and live by, which is the reminder of the inevitability of death, not as something morbid, but as an invitation to live more honestly, presently, and fully. Somewhere between heaviness and humor and mortality and joy, there is a quiet freedom in realizing none of us escape life untouched and none of us make it out alive.