I'm Kristen Vermilyea.
I'm a death virgin*.
death virgin is kristen vermilyea’s multidisciplinary art project exploring mortality, grief, and the questions we avoid until we no longer can.
let's talk about death!
What happens when you hit mid-life and have never learned how to mourn?
I'm 56 and have never lost anyone extremely close to me.* (Knocks wood.) This is incredibly rare.** This fact and its consequences occupy more and more of my thoughts daily, especially as those around me hit middle-age and more and more contemporaries and parents begin to die.
Spurred on by this devastating yet inevitable fact, I've become a bit obsessed with not only learning how to mourn but exploring the concept of mourning itself. So I'm throwing myself into an artistic and boundary-pushing journey, discovering along the way that it may be more than just my inexperience that’s keeping me from learning.***
Yes, I’ve lost all my grandparents and several aunts and uncles. (We are not a close family.)
I’ve thought a lot about how I define “super close” when it comes to people in my life and how that definition might be different when dealing with their deaths. Does it have to be an immediate family member? A blood relative? A best friend? Someone I see or talk to daily / often? I don’t know, but I’m thinking about it and will explore it in the film.
**By age 18, 90% of people have experienced the death of a very close friend or relative.
*** An old friend once said that my lack of being able to internalize emotional things was akin to “Trying to experience love by making a rom-com”. Could be true, Nick.