My dad was a visual artist in the truth of who he was. He painted like a mad man, easily producing a new painting every few days. He created literally over a thousand paintings, boxes, and books. His studio had a large closet that spanned the length of his 15 by 15-foot room where hundreds of paintings were stored. Even the top of the closet was used, holding the boxes he made. There was a bookcase full of the sketch pads he turned into “books” which he had filled with collages, poems, and drawings. More paintings, boxes, and books littered the room, up against the walls, piled in corners, spilling into the laundry room. I did the math. Assuming thirty years of creating roughly 1,000 pieces (though I’m sure there were more than this) from the age of twenty to fifty (though it was longer than this) he produced a new piece roughly every two weeks. I remember times when he would produce a new painting every day. If he wanted, or as he explained it needed, to paint, then there was no stopping him. When working he would call in sick to stay home and be in his studio. Eventually, he refused to work anymore, and my mom became the bread winner of the family. For roughly five years he stayed home painting full-time. But my mom grew frustrated with him. He was home, but not taking care of the house, not doing the work to try and sell his paintings either. It was more than my mom was willing to take, and so my dad went back to work for roughly three years before he got sick enough to stay home once more. My dad was painfully shy in some ways and never liked being around people very much. Even friends he would only see on occasion. He hated the idea that he would have to approach gallery owners to display his work, to sell his work. He didn’t want to do the networking, those in person meetings to get to know the right people. He would send slides of his work by mail to a gallery, they would show some interest and schedule a meeting. Dad would then come up with an excuse for why he had to cancel, usually only an hour or two before the agreed upon time. Once canceled, my dad would never phone the person back to reschedule. In his thirties and forties, he would sometimes submit to different exhibitions, like the Toronto Art Fair. However, these were easy to get into, and filled with hundreds of artists, usually just out of school. He imagined that a big-time gallery owner would come to one of these shows, see his art, and take my dad on as a client after first sight. However, these shows were mainly attended by the general public, people looking for art affordable art. No big-time gallery owner ever showed. He also never sold any of his art at these exhibits. It just wasn’t affordable by any stretch. He would ask for thousands of dollars for each of his paintings. He was asking for amounts that only well-known artists would ask. He couldn’t compete with the other artists selling their work for under a hundred dollars. He would then come home crushed, complaining that he would never to go to another art show. The truth was he didn’t care that he didn’t sell his work, but that he wasn’t discovered. Now, because of my failure, he will never be discovered. I lost all but twenty-five of his thousand paintings. When my parents were in their mid-sixties, they needed to move out of the townhouse that they had lived in for over thirty years. Dad was no longer painting at this point and was quite ill with heart disease, but the basement studio was still full of his art. He was going to throw everything away as there would be no room in the new, significantly smaller apartment they were moving to. He felt defeated and said that both he and his art would never amount to anything. I couldn’t stand that. I investigated storage lockers. I would have needed one roughly eight feet by eight feet to accommodate everything but couldn’t afford the rental fee of one that size. Instead, I worked my budget and found a three by four-foot locker. While my dad said he appreciated my keeping the paintings, he didn’t have the heart to pick and choose which to keep or throw away. So, it was up to me to go through every piece of his art deciding what would stay and what would go. I was able to keep roughly two hundred and fifty paintings, thirty boxes, and fifteen books. For the next four years I spent just under two hundred dollars a month on the storage locker. He never talked about how he felt after we threw out so much of his art. I believe he couldn’t think about it, or it would have broken his heart. He just had to walk away and never mention them again. My intention was always to make an inventory, take photos, and catalog all the remaining artwork. Then I would send those photos of his art to galleries, inquire with agents. But of course, life got in the way. I was spending all my time either working or going to my parents’ apartment on the weekends to take care of them. Both were ill and basically bedridden by this point. And so, the years slipped by with the paintings never seeing the light of day. A few years later, both mom and dad passed. I was out of work, it was the beginning of Covid, and I had no income. I’d just come out of hospital because of a mental health crisis. I was behind on paying my rent, my electricity, my phone, and the storage locker. My friend in Timmins thankfully took me in. A few months passed as I worked on my recovery. I got a part-time job, saved my money. I had always wanted to move to Timmins and decided now was the time to call Timmins home permanently. Due to Covid, my landlord in Toronto thankfully couldn’t evict me. My friend and I arranged to get a truck and move what we could of my possessions from Toronto before I lost the apartment for good. There was just the two of us, rushing. We had only the one December weekend and it was going to take eight hours to drive to Toronto and another eight to return. We left before dawn on Friday and arrived in Toronto that afternoon. Immediately we got to work packing and loading the truck. There was just so much stuff to go through and no time. The weather was also not our friend. We now had to be back on the road by three on Saturday afternoon to make it back before the big snow storm coming Sunday morning. We didn’t get through everything. I left about half of the contents of the apartment behind, including my bed, TV, books, couch. There wasn’t enough time to go through all my parents’ possessions as well, so most were left behind. We could have stayed a couple of extra hours packing in the apartment, but that would have meant not getting any of my dad’s artwork. So, we left the apartment around one, making our way to the storage locker. I had to cut the lock because the key had long since disappeared. I opened the locker and was immediately overwhelmed. I had forgotten just how much there really was. How was I supposed to go through all this in the hour we had left? The paintings were heavy, and we could only take them one or two at a time, down a hall, and then outside to the truck. It was going to take too much time to get them all. I had to make an impossible choice. Save seventy-five to a hundred pieces of art or go through what I could and pull out the ones that meant something to me. I started flipping through the paintings. My friend took the ones I chose to the truck. The hour slipped by too quickly and I was only halfway through. We had to go. New weather reports said the storm was going to be worse than originally expected. I shut the door to the storage locker, crying, knowing I failed to keep my commitment to my dad, failed to save his artwork. If only I had gone through them during those intervening years, done the inventory. I could have quickly found and potentially saved up to one hundred of the paintings that day. Roughly a month later I got a call from my parents’ old neighbour. A man had come by saying that he had all my dad’s paintings from the locker. She gave me this man’s number and I called. I don’t remember much of the conversation with him other than crying, explaining that I had no money, no way to get the paintings back from him at the moment. But I promised the second I had money I would buy them back, to please just give me a couple of months. He offered to hold them for six months, sounding sympathetic to my situation, seeming genuine. I phoned three months later, a full-time job in hand, money in hand. I left a message that I was able to buy back my dad’s artwork. I heard nothing. I phoned back a week later. I phoned back every week for a month. I started begging him to call me back, that it was fine if he no longer had the paintings, I just wanted to know what happened to them. Did he still have them? Had they been sold? Were they thrown away? I promised and promised that I wouldn’t get upset, I just needed to know what happened. I phoned every month for a year, imploring him to call me back. I eventually gave up, but my stomach still turns when I think about the unknown fate of those paintings. I once had a dream that I would do the work my dad couldn’t do to sell his art. It was going to be my gift to him. I was supposed to go through the paintings in the storage locker, to send photos off to galleries, to work on getting him an agent. I did none of that, and now all but a handful of his paintings are gone. All but a handful to be forgotten forever.