Streetnotes

This essay, a metafictional account, arose from the grief and trauma of losing my mother in March of 2019, one year prior to the 2020 Pandemic shutdown. One of the formal challenges was in exploring how best to represent the soundscape of city and household she might have heard in her final hours. At the same time, it also imagines her interior soundscape, the moment of death and the transition to the afterlife she had hoped for. The essay was conceptualized as one of several "islands" in an archipelago of essays as you see them here. Each island, each essay, is rendered all the more interesting (we  hope!) in the way they are situated in this intimate yet quarantined zoom community of long standing friendships and shared intellectual vision.