How Do I Let You Die

HOW DO I LET YOU DIE? is a multimedia monologue written by Michele Lee about the inevitability of death: her parents’ and her own. 

In February 2020, as Australia careened from deadly bushfires to the beginning of COVID-19, Michele rang her parents for 30 minutes each day. She recorded these calls. She wanted to figure out how to talk to them about death: their death, the Hmong perspective on death, the deaths they’ve endured here and in Laos. And in asking “how do I let my parents die on their terms”, she was reconciling long-held emotional, cultural and geographical distance.

HOW DO I LET YOU DIE? brings together an extraordinary team of Asian-Australian artists to weave together these phone calls, Hmong horror stories, and the simple potency of an adult child coming to terms with a parent’s eventual death.