kevin o'farrell

At approximately 10:30 on the morning of Wednesday, July 30, 2025, my friend Terry and I sat on my back porch to drink coffee, eat pastries, and talk about nothing in particular. He had recently been diagnosed with cancer, though the prognosis was still uncertain. Fifty-two days later, he would be gone.

A video camera documented the occasion. It was meant to be a weekly ritual. The innocuous banter was not the point; the coffee, the sacral sweets, and the community were. But we never got the chance for another.

When I learned Terry was entering hospice, I returned to the video. In my grief, I began examining it frame by frame, searching for something to hold onto. Each frame its own moment, one sixtieth of a second, each seemingly identical to the one before and the one after until the pixels imperceptibly shifted. The repetition brought a kind of respite, a fragile order to what could not be understood.

Is a moment a measurement of time, or of feeling? How long is a moment when it’s all that’s left?

Terry was a mirror that reflected back an image of myself that was different than the one i saw when looking alone. What will i do now that he is gone? What will i do?

These images are the product of my desperate grieving—pixels fading but frozen, serendipitously morphing into shapes, patterns and runes of unfathomable meaning — a futile attempt to find the essence that was Terry in the space between stillness and loss.