“The Price of Breath”

2020 | 18”x24” | Mixed-media:
Prismacolor Verithin red/blue colored pencil, Derwent Inktense pencils, black ink, white charcoal, and water brush on cold press watercolor paper mounted and sealed on wooden panel.
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My entire life has seemed to me a struggle for breath—literally. On Election Day 2020, I finally underwent a tonsillectomy to remove my hypertrophic tonsils so that I could sleep and breathe at last. Unfortunately two weeks into my recovery, during a new moon in November 2020, an artery opened in my throat causing me to have to undergo emergency surgery to save my life.

As I lay recovering in the ICU listening to the alerts of the machines attached to Covid-19 patients singing through the hours, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of survivor’s guilt nearly dying in order to breathe as others around me fought for life and air.

For me, this piece encapsulates both the transformation and the trauma of helplessness. Sometimes when healing the only thing we can do is surrender to the time it takes until we can breathe again.

The flowers—Asclepias curassavica (also known as “bloodflowers” and Mexican butterfly weed)—forming with the lungs the shape of butterfly wings represent this soul change. This flower also serves as one of many larval host plants of the species of Aslepias milkweeds for the hosts of monarch caterpillars during the monarch butterfly migration which makes its way through Mexico during the celebration of Dio de los Muertos (The Day of The Dead). Like the butterflies believed to be the returned souls of the dead, these flowers honor those with pre-existing conditions (like myself) who have fought so hard for their lives through chronic and life-threatening illness only to be lost to the Covid-19 pandemic. As of Febraury 2022, two years into the pandemic, the death toll in the United States borders on 1,000,000.