When Does Grief Begin? — WWHIVDD? on Processing
Personal / Political / Anticipatory Grief

for Landscapes

I paste here the Introduction, co-written by myself & Andrew Suggs, to a piece that we, along with WWHIVDD? members Alex Juhasz, Ben Evans, Molly Pearson, and Michael McFadden take some time to process three strands of grief we identified during a series of in-person / virtual / hybrid workshops in 2025. You can read the whole text at Landscapes, a publication by A Blade of Grass.

The following text was compiled by a small group of doulas engaged in a kind of grief work over the past year that included Ben Evans, Alexandra Juhasz, Michael McFadden, Molly Pearson, Andrew Suggs, and me. This work was rooted in activating and responding to Alexandra Juhasz’s documentary film Please Hold 1 (2025) and its companion archival installation, Holding Patterns, presented in both New York and Los Angeles in the fall of 2025. Please Hold is an experimental documentary engaging with decades of DIY activist media, two death bed/legacy videos, and the wisdom of many living “AIDS workers,” as they all sit together in one (changing) format, video—VHS, Hi8, digital, Zoom—to address these and other questions:

How do neighborhoods, sweaters and scarves, videotapes, and queer bars hold ghosts?

How do we let them go?

This unabashedly DIY video holds Juhasz’s images of: Jim (James Robert Lamb, 1963–1993), a gay white male go-go dancer who died painfully at 29 before there were meds in 1993; Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski (1957–2022), a Black disabled queer feminist media activist who died in 2022 on her own terms, in her sixties, and due largely to inequities in the American healthcare system and COVID; Alex, a queer feminist caught with them on tape at 29 and 59; fellow AIDS workers Ted Kerr, Marty Fink, Pato Hebert, and Jih-Fei Cheng; and the current owners of the Lower East Side’s legendary queer bar, the Parkside Lounge; as well as streets, hospitals, and apartments of New York, then and now.

After watching and discussing the video several times, we collectively devised two generative public “political grief” workshops focused on naming, holding, and sharing our own grief honestly and communally. While planning those workshops across many online meetings throughout the year, we kept a shared document that included notes, chat text logs, process-based thinking, comment-bubble-annotated runs of show, and tangential observations, among other things.2

To create this piece, we decided we would each reflect on the process of processing grief—which we did both during the planning stages with each other and more publicly during the workshops. We also decided that we would cite our working document in these new reflections, which you will find as footnotes throughout. Our intention in composing this text was two-pronged: first, to engage once more in the act of doulaing ourselves, and second, to offer a tangible sense of what that can look like—not just for us, but for any group who continues to choose the work, the process, and each other.

Before you read on, we invite you to watch Please Hold, the death bed/legacy videos of Jim and Juanita, or the conversations between Juhasz and fellow AIDS workers, or to engage with the myriad digital holdings of AIDS memory and response available on the Please Hold website.3 By doing so, you become part of an enduring web of community that together holds grief and hope in light of HIV/AIDS and other assaults; by doing so, you touch and consider how digital traces can (and can not) contribute to communal memory and connection.

– C. (Constantine Jones) & Andrew Suggs