April 17th

This autobiographical story tells about the call I received on April 17th 2017 announcing that my grandmother Denise, whom I hadn’t seen in many years since my father’s suicide in 1991, was dying in France. Joined by my mother and grandmother we embark on the last road trip to Denise.

I began writing the script for this graphic novel in 2020, but the story it tells is based on diary pages and unsent letters to my father and grandmother that I wrote years prior. Since I was a child growing up without many answers about my father’s life and early passing, I began writing to myself and to him, questions about who he and I were.

After my father’s death the relationship between his family and my mother’s was profoundly fractured, and more than a decade would pass until I would be able to visit his family again in France.

However the relations between both of my parents’ families would remain strained until that April morning in 2017, when I was offered a last opportunity to attempt to repair the bridge between my mother’s family in Spain, and my father’s family in France.

14 pages