Condolence

Dear Linda Frye Burnham,

It is impossible to write about your partner, Steven Durland, who was called back today, without an extraordinary amount of gratitude.

I feel overwhelmed by how grateful and complete I feel as an artist and person by the great sacrifice and experiment of your collaborative lives.

Three hours behind you, my day did not start in gratitude, but in heartache.

I am not ashamed to say that I lay in bed and wept. For you, and for all that know this wonderful human.

But as the day went on, I begin to put together the pieces of an eternal puzzle and understand the enormity and fragility of this thing we call a life.

You have so graciously and generously guided us on a daily reporting of Steve’s condition and illness. I followed a narrative I knew all too well in my own familial life. The diagnosis seemed almost, if not the same.

And what I am once again reminded of, it seems almost too simple too bear; death is the norm, life is the miracle.

10:45 A.M., March 11, 2026, Moses Cone Memorial Hospital, Greensboro, North Carolina.

You held his hand in his last breath, as I did for my father in his.

You have both lived many lives, and I would not be the artist I am today without intersecting in at least one of them.

How can you properly thank someone, especially in death, for the gifts of their labor?

I am the direct recipient of your inquiry and investment.

Your work as artists, writers, activists, archivists, journalists, editors, creators, designers, non-profit founders, avant-gardists, and so much more, not only paved, but created the space for a whole generation of artists from many disciplines to thrive and grow.

How extraordinary to be such generative souls that you made a village!

So many others intersect in your well lived life in much more profound and lasting ways, but I enter during your Astro Artz and High-Performance Magazine era. When you eventually become the 18^th Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica, the legendary and influential progressive and experimental center that includes spaces for galleries, performances, residencies and housing.

It is at our beloved Highways Performance Space, run by you and Tim Miller, that a whole generation of young artists from Los Angeles, and really throughout the world, become the avant-gardists that we were always meant to be.

We learn to perform, to curate, to produce, to demonstrate, to politic, to push at the boundaries, and most of all, to make, to create, to be in community.

The story of a journey is long and winding and much more complicated and complex than the one I am painting here. But for me, it is simply the creation of a space where I could become.

Yes, I am dripping in grief, wandering in loss, but I am also floating in the spirit of gratitude.

In time, there will be so many more words, but tonight, I am swimming in a great big river of feelings.

Steven Durland, rest in peace, que en paz descanse.

Steven Durland, presente!