ZAMA Creative | For Granted • Documentary
ZAMA Creative • (ZC) • is a separate enterprise from my media services company Upbound Media Group LLC aggregating all of my personal publishing spaces, commercial or commentative.
ZAMA Creative is all about the solo projects. representing the creative wing of my work.
For Granted
I don’t have all the words—at least, not yet. But I can begin with how this started. There were signs as far back as 2007. Rewinding the movie too many times. Forgetting your train of thought mid conversation more than usual. But no one knew the full extent of the problem.
In 2014, I graduated from Trinity College with a double major in Philosophy and Human Rights Studies. Before I even started my career in education, I was already stepping into a caregiving role, helping my father recover from neurological surgeries. At first, it was occasional—emergency room visits, recovery support—but by 2017, his condition had worsened, and the role became more constant. By 2020, caregiving for my father, now battling neurodegenerative disease, had become a full-time job requiring unrelenting vigilance.
Parkinson’s, compounded by his history with trigeminal neuralgia, made his world—and ours—an uphill battle. He resisted help at every turn, even as his body and mind turned against him. The skills I’d once used to support students with executive functioning now became essential tools for navigating the needs of someone I love. Every day was an exercise in patience, resilience, and grace, not only for him but for my mother, whose strength I leaned on constantly.
This is just a glimpse of a larger story—a story of care, struggle, and love. For now, I invite you to visit Quiet Care, a ZAMA Creative space documenting my caregiving journey, past and present. In the meantime, I hope these curated moments offer a small window into this deeply personal chapter of my life beginning with this teaser trailer for the documentary depicting this story. Our story.
40 Years
In 1981, my mother set aside her music career to take a finance job she would hold for 27 years. She met my father in 1984, and they began dating in 1988. By the time I was born in 1992, they had already shared eight years of each other’s lives. As of 2024, they’ve been in each other’s lives for 40 years. My mother carries the weight of those years in her own way. One decade is a long time; four decades is a lifetime.
In August 2020, I told my mother I would formalize my caregiving role for my father, her husband, through a governing organization, so she could tend to her own medical needs. She took steps to make this possible, but my father’s symptoms escalated beyond what we could manage together. On July 19, 2021—two days before his birthday—my father left the Brooklyn home he had moved into in 1979. He has not returned and is not likely to do so.
ZAMA Creative • (ZC) • will produce and publish this independent documentary in Q4 2027. If nothing else, I hope to showcase the beginning of the journey that my mother and I walk as the situation without him in person, but assuredly in work to call other to not be quiet while they offer care.
We hope to showcase our story of how we start to process and persevere through this most distressing era, and to show others a possibility of how not to take or granted the very many opportunities one is afforded, even in overwhelming and blinding circumstances.
ZAMA Creative
ZAMA Creative • (ZC) • is a separate enterprise from my media services company Upbound Media Group LLC aggregating all of my personal publishing spaces, commercial or commentative.