Artist Spotlight: Patrick de Belen
- Mikaela Brewer
- 9 hours ago
- 20 min read
A conversation with Senior Editor, Mikaela Brewer, for The 44 North
Editor's Note:
In late July, I had the absolute privilege of speaking with Patrick de Belen on a warm afternoon in Trinity Bellwoods Park, near his brother's memorial bench. I'm immensely grateful. I hope our conversation reaches you in some way.
On The Last Note & The Experience of Grief
Mikaela Brewer (MB): I would love to start with your documentary, The Last Note.
Patrick de Belen (PDB): Yes, The Last Note is an experimental documentary—an intersection of the Filipino immigrant experience, mental health, and suicide. It's also about the many different kinds of grief that come with being an immigrant family. And then, of course, it’s about losing someone—my little brother—and my attempt at trying to fill in the blanks that are left from suicide (alongside the acceptance that some blanks are never filled). It's full of music and art, because we were both artists, and also Toronto; the documentary was shot in the city with a few shots in the Philippines. It’s a Toronto story, and that was important to me because any young person who's grown up here will relate to it. We worked on it for 5 years, and finished at the beginning of 2026.
MB: I love what you said about how there are some things you don't find answers to—some gaps you can't fill. There are connections with archival work there—of our own lives, others' lives, and people we’ve lost in particular—and trying to piece things together. In bearing witness to your brother’s life, how did that shape your understanding of grief? Did it change the language around it, or the way you write poems, or engage with music, journals, and memory?
PDB: Yeah. I’ve been a storyteller my entire life, and professionally as an artist for 12-13 years. I think about storytelling as preservation—as a way of memorializing people—and that’s always been embedded in my work. I’ve written about grief for years, alongside mental health and suicide. And as someone who deals with suicidal ideation, it’s long been a theme across what I write.
Working on the documentary specifically, while experiencing losing my brother to suicide, I felt a dramatic and drastic confrontation with these themes. When it’s just you, there's time—a lifetime to explore, change, and learn. But when [my brother died], it was so intense and sudden. It was a flood of new information, along with new emotions about grief that weren’t there before.
It’s easy to talk about grief in a removed way, as a theme and as a concept, but when you go through it so intensely, the way you learn it is different. It’s all-consuming and overwhelms you. A lot of the documentary is that. It shows a person who thought they knew what grief was—thought they knew what mental health and suicide was—and then became totally immersed in it. That was the difference. I learned, in almost a desperate way to cope, and that led to this project. You can hear that desperation—needing information fast—because I didn’t think I could go another day without figuring out how to live with this huge hole. I was throwing little grains of sand into the hole, trying to fill it. That was it: The intensity and the urgency of learning. And you can tell in the documentary. That’s what's changed. But I also started to realize what the more cliché information about grief was—the platitudes I wasn’t really aware of before. For example, saying, “Time heals everything,” or, “God has a plan.” We say these to people from our own discomfort when they’re dealing with grief. Now, I realize how shallow those words were. All of this was sudden, intense, and all-consuming, and with that came a desperation to find answers fast.
On An Artist’s Sense of Responsibility
MB: Absolutely. And losing somebody to suicide, while also having similar thoughts and feelings, do you feel an extra sense of responsibility there as an artist? To try to put grief into words, or try to find better ways of speaking with people about it, aside from the platitudes?
PDB: Yes, definitely a heightened responsibility. Being an older brother was my first role in life; it was the first role I understood. Even as a child, with the way my family was—we had a rough, turbulent childhood—I understood my role, and it was difficult to be a parentified kid. But an older brother was something I understood quickly. That will appear in my work for the rest of my life—in writing, mentorship, and providing platforms and opportunities for young people to receive guidance and see healthy pathways to growing up. That’s always been something I’ve been doing, so I already had that responsibility.
When you identify so strongly as someone who cares about youth, then lose your little brother to suicide, that just heightens and highlights that responsibility. But also, in a way, it became a weight for a few years, and I didn’t know if I could continue to bear it after losing the young person that I’d been caring for and mentoring for their entire life. Five years later, I’m more comfortable with that heightened responsibility, which led to the film. There’s going to be another young person who watches it—who needs to see it and who I believe needs to see it. That’s what drove me to the end of finishing it many times. It wasn’t easy to finish.
MB: Yes. And there’s that blending of grief and the creative process.
PDB: And it’s a tale as old as time. So much of my work is about that. And that’s why it’s crazy to me to think about the lack of grief literacy in our society, because we’ve been consuming content about it since we can remember. Whenever you listen to emo music or rap songs, there are themes of grief—it’s embedded in the media we consume, yet it doesn’t always translate to actual grief literacy. That gap is part of what I wanted this documentary to fill. I want people to enjoy it as if enjoying any other piece of media, but leave with concrete tools to build more grief-literate relationships.
On Silence & Loudness
MB: I love that, and it’s a beautiful segue into something I wanted to ask you about, which is a phrase a person I used to work with said: That there’s a difference between the generative silence that leads to art versus the abysmal silence that leads to things like suicide. I’m curious if you have thoughts on that phrasing, or if it was part of your process putting the documentary together (or putting poems together)?
PDB: Could you tell me more about what generative silence is to you?
MB: To me, it’s that quiet when words come to me, or an inspiration period where you have moments of thinking: “These words need to go into this poem.”
PDB: Yeah: The good versus bad quiet—good silence, bad silence. After losing my little brother, I quickly ran to the Philippines—for months. There were weeks on end where I didn't say a word. I'd be by the ocean, either working on poetry or the film, in almost complete silence. I didn’t say much, except to my parents. In that way, the silence was a good thing. But the abysmal silence isn’t silence in its obvious sense; it’s more an unwillingness to have conversations that are important to have. And that’s a theme in the film: The idea that there’s so much that went unsaid, whether within my family or within Filipino culture as a whole, when it comes to suicide and mental health. That's why the documentary itself, I would say, is so loud, even though the process of creating it was very quiet. The actual piece itself is loud, top to bottom. The quietest part is the end. It’s almost a spite and anger towards that abysmal silence that led to such a loud project. Whether it’s the metal music or the explicit conversations around pain, grief, and suicide, that was my way of addressing that silence. I thought: “If we’re not going to talk about it for whatever reason, I’m going to make something that forces you to listen.” All of that discomfort was part of that process.
It wasn’t a goal of mine to have this conversation with grace or gentleness. It was angry, and it was honest. It’s like that moment a kid yells at their parents for the first time. It’s always ugly, uncomfortable, and imperfect, but there’s a moment where you don’t feel seen in a place that you’re supposed to feel the most love and the most safe, and when you don’t, you no longer know how to communicate that properly. So you just yell. I feel that’s a good metaphor for parts of this documentary: It’s loud and confrontational.
I do flow in and out of those [silences]. If anything, after this experience, I’ve become a lot more comfortable in the healthy, quiet silence, and it’s because I let so much out in the process of creating the documentary. It was cathartic; I was able to yell and wail, and again, that’s commentary on the silence within the Filipino community—whether the diaspora or back in the motherland—around mental health and suicide. And I think it’s intuitive: Some people know they’re supposed to have conversations, but the discomfort is what stops them. The culture and programming prevent the conversation from happening, which creates that [abysmal] silence. This project is very much here to criticize that, but also, ultimately, welcome people in. You cry, you yell at your parents, and then you apologize after. There’s a moment after you’ve yelled at them when they no longer see you as a kid. They can’t just [rely on] discipline, and you no longer see them as people who have to take care of you; they become just two people. Those are vulnerable moments of imperfection, and then ideally, you embrace each other [and apologize]. That’s in the film, too.
MB: Yes. When you give a voice to something, whether it’s a person, grief, or difficult topics—or spend time, I suppose, trying to figure out what that voice sounds like—then it comes out in a beautiful way. That’s what you've done, which is powerful, but also needed and beautiful.
PDB: Thanks for calling it beautiful. I definitely think it’s the ugliest form of beauty. It’s not what people might consider beautiful off the bat. But you’re right, it’s beautiful in its ugliness and rawness. And that’s definitely the challenge of the documentary: To show ugly things and ask: Could this be something we need? And not only what we need, but what we can, by the end of the film, call beautiful? I believe we can, after watching it.
MB: Yeah. Even if just in how you hold it. Maybe that’s the beauty: How you take [what you’ve held] into future conversations, to support people in your community or yourself, right?
PDB: Yes. There’s a line in my poem, “Butterfly Knife,” which we’ll get to later, where I say: “Peace is something people died for.” And that’s always it. For a lot of what we consider beauty, we don’t understand the actual pain behind creating it. There’s a wider narrative here: Thinking we deserve beauty and joy without suffering. I understand it, but we also don’t look at the ugliness that came before all the beautiful things we love in the world, which is ultimately what allows us to feel that sense of beauty. And connected to the silence, Filipinos don’t like talking about this. The documentary is all about that. My Lola is in it—my grandma talking about her first confrontation with the idea of depression, wrestling with what it means. You can see that on screen: This person who grew up in the worst, poorest neighbourhood in the Philippines, learning about what depression is through the death of her grandson by suicide. I got to see that on camera, which was probably one of my favourite parts.
On Art from Scars & Wounds
MB: I can imagine. There are so many layers there. And it’s interesting you mentioned the poem—this is a bridge into the community work you do. There’s an idea a mentor told me (I've also heard it floating around) that when you’re an artist, and you’re creating things from personal experience, you should try to write from a scar instead of an open wound. This is also connected to something I was going to mention earlier: What we hold onto versus what we let go of, and how we let all of these things coexist in art. I’m curious how you resonate with that concept, or how true you think it is? Because we’ve been talking about the rawness necessary to represent something fully, which lends more towards an open wound. In an art sense, how do you create something that’s going to resonate with and reach people, while also being [true to] your own experience?
PDB: You know, I go back and forth with this concept a lot. As a spoken word artist working with young people, empowering them to explore their voice for the first time, I [witness] a lot of ‘open wound’ content because they’re deep in what they’re going through. And then, what you sometimes see—and this depends on guidance, facilitation, and the relationship between mentor and mentee—is that through writing and creating about an open wound, they begin to heal. The art itself becomes medicine. That’s why, sometimes, I’m critical of the concept of only writing from a scar versus an open wound. Because some people write to cope. Am I not supposed to create until my wound is relatively healed? Can I not use my art to cope now, like I’ve used my art to cope my entire life?
I feel this is part of the overly-therapized language we constantly use: A utopian idea that struggle doesn’t need to be considered when talking about the best version of making things, or the healthiest version of making things. I agree that it’s the ideal future—where people only write from scars—but the reality is, people are open wounds all around us, and sometimes art is their way of healing. I don’t want anyone to stop creating from something just because it’s not healed. If you do, you also stop the potential for that art to be part of your healing process. What if it expedites it, helping you heal in a way that makes you feel joy faster or sooner, which could be great for people who deal with suicidal ideation, especially? If talking about suicide helps me feel less alone, which in turn helps me feel less like I want to die, don’t tell me to stop because my wound is still open. That’s my criticism of the concept.
However, I do believe that some of the best work I’ve done isn’t after I’ve healed, but later on in my healing journey where [I have] more perspective. That life lived gives me more to work with, because then I can work around the story. I can leave the pain and look at other people, the world, and relationships. A lot of my work is [strong] now because I’m farther away from its [catalyst], but that doesn’t mean the work I wrote inside the pain was bad. It was uncomfortable. It was raw. And I think that’s part of why it was good. A lot of people are still listening to Nirvana while many criticize how unhealthy Kurt Cobain was. This is a fact—he was unhealthy—but there’s a reason why people still gravitate towards his music. It’s because they’re in open wounds [themselves], needing to see and hear something written by someone else in an open wound. That’s still, to me, a healing relationship—you feel less isolated in the feeling.
As you can tell, I have a back and forth with that concept. It might be too binary, and lacking nuance. It comes from people’s discomfort with watching art that’s too uncomfortable, honest, or triggering, which is another pattern in overly-therapized language. We’re [taught] to protect people from truth or from watching hard things, but as someone who’s written about hard things my whole life, it’s part of my MO. It’s natural for me to push back against that without removing the actual health part of it—that’s still important.
MB: They coexist. These things don't cancel each other out. You’re so right about overly-therapized language. And also, the idea of being fully healed [isn’t real]—it’s not what happens. You gather additional life experience, maybe, that lends to how you think about or process something. And then you put it into words. The healing journey, or however you want to conceptualize it for yourself, is long and exists in non-linear time.
PDB: Like grief. Grief is nonlinear, right? A scar can be an open wound again.
MB: Because you pick the scab or someone/thing else picks the scab.
PDB: Exactly. To have to wait to create until there’s a scab or a scar, to me, isn’t lending well to a conversation around nonlinear grief. My wound might be open 5 years later, and I'm still going to write from there.
There are so many examples in history of people caring for others grieving the worst, darkest moments. And if we truly want to adapt this idea of community into an anti-capitalist way of existing, part of doing so is understanding our capacity for care and listening to people. Stop telling people to heal faster so that we can listen to them and feel less uncomfortable. That’s not it. Hold them in their darkest moments. Be there for them. Sometimes, you don’t require the trauma-informed, institutional training to [support someone]. Sometimes we can just show up, even in that discomfort.
On Friendship & Decolonizing Grief
MB: Yes. There’s such a conversation [centring] palatable ways of talking about grief, especially around love. And I do believe grief and love are intertwined—they always are. But grief is intertwined with anger and rage, too. When you’re writing, how does that feel for you? Do you see grief as resilience? I wonder if we’re decolonizing it by reckoning with what it brings up—fully.
PDB: I love how you said that. Decolonizing grief is a crazy concept—I don’t think I’ve heard that yet. But yes, it’s leaving room for the harder parts. There’s a modern narrative around grief and mental health that’s an indirect byproduct of capitalism; it’s an unwillingness to be a true community and care for each other. [Grief] then becomes prettier—Instagram-packaged, [assuming] I can read [a post] about grief and [instantly] feel better about myself as someone who’s either grieving or supporting someone in grief. Really, though, the whole point is to sit in the not knowing, and acknowledge that you’re in intense pain and don’t know how to fix it. Capitalism makes us all want to fix things so we can go back into society and become working labourers once again. But we can choose to sit with people in [their grief]. And it’s going to suck, but I’m going to bear witness to it, and that’s it. Maybe I’m going to send you an Uber Eats order later, and you might not even go outside to get it, but I’m going to send it to you anyway. It’s this idea of care, and being a witness to people in grief. It doesn't need any more language. It needs, if anything, us to simplify it. We’ve over-complicated the process. What does it mean to be a friend? Have you had a friend in kindergarten who witnessed the moment you lost a favourite toy? When you cried and had a tantrum, what did your friend do? How did you maintain that relationship? Let’s go back to that and less [toward] trying to know the “right ways to say things,” you know?
MB: Absolutely. And I think we have to stop telling our friends, “I can’t handle that. You should go to a therapist.” It comes from a place of thinking we don’t have the tools or skills. And maybe that’s true for certain things. But we can show up—there are always ways we can show up.
PDB: 100%. That’s why friendships these days—and our commitment to friendships—have changed. Maybe, generally, things like social media have shifted them, but we also pretend there’s a necessity for institutional help as a way of avoiding conflict. We forget that conflict is what makes relationships stronger. Instead, we [back away] when something feels too hard to talk about, and we say, “Please go somewhere else to do that.”
Before the institutions existed, it was only us. What would we do? We’d mark your door, leave flowers, and do what we could. Maybe try to bring a meal. I don’t want to romanticize [the past] or all practices in it, because they weren’t always great. But there’s something to be said about how friendships have become more surface-level and low-commitment because of our unwillingness to have hard conversations.
And there’s a difference between that and trauma dumping. That’s a different part of the story. If there’s one friend who’s constantly [consuming] the space and not sharing it with others, then yes, please tell them to chill and share the energy. But there’s a difference between that and me being unwilling to have hard conversations with my friend.
MB: Exactly. Well said. Mic drop.
PDB: Thanks. Sometimes I [worry] people think this is aggressive, or a hot take, but you know what? I’m ten toes. I stand on it.
MB: But when we’re talking about grief, suicide prevention, and changing how we think about them, we have to be firm about it.
PDB: Yes. To me, there’s a level of urgency because we’re also dealing with collective grief. We’re watching death and war from around the world. And if we don’t get better at being a true community and caring for each other, I don’t know how we’re going to make it through these things.
On Mentoring & Relationships
MB: Exactly. This is a great transition into the role of a poet in community, being a facilitator, and the work you do there. The first thing I wanted to ask you is: How do you allow your own grief and life experiences to be visible when you’re mentoring, without, of course, making it about you, per se? When you’re teaching or guiding, how do you carry your own grief so others see you as somebody who’s not shutting it down within yourself?
PDB: Yes. Before I answer that question, a quote came to mind by Saul Williams: “A poet is the death doula for a dying empire.”
MB: Well, my next tattoo is set.
PDB: Right? Saul Williams is so talented, but what a concept to think about. So, as a ‘death doula,’ guiding people through transitions, there are sensitivities around talking about your own story. But I always go back to when I used to do youth mentorship: I’d take these little kids to play basketball and talk about life. And when you think about being in school, and you [remember] your best teachers, most of the time, our favourite teachers were the ones who shared an authentic, personal moment with you. They sat kids down and said: “Man, I know this is fucking hard. It was hard for me. And I’m here for you.” That was an impressionable moment where they shared something beyond the hierarchical understanding of education. A good teacher is willing to bring lived experience into the classroom. Does that provide risk? Of course it does. But that’s the risk that comes with caring about the next generation. There’s risk because we have investment in it. We care. And with care comes risk. The conversation, for me, is not to avoid that, and rather, to learn how to protect ourselves and our students in the process. So when it comes to mentoring poets, it’s an intuitive thing. You’re [part of] the relationship, but not trying to impose your own growth or your own story. Instead, you’re trying to equip them with the tools they need to navigate their own growth. Sometimes that does come from sharing, “This is what I did, this is what worked, and this is what didn’t.” You have to trust that you’re guiding them toward becoming someone who can use their own discernment. Maybe there’s ego involved, and if there is, check yourself. I’ve made mistakes, too, but much like the conversation we had around grief, the goal for me is never to separate or create lines between people, but rather, to equip folks with better tools to go on this journey together, side by side.
MB: I love that. And because we’ve been talking so much about grief: If anything to bring into those spaces together, it’s that. To have grief be a part of the journey for both mentor and mentee is [beautiful]—it’s one of the most universal, if not the most universal human experience. It’s something we will all feel in our lives, no matter what it’s connected to.
PDB: Exactly. The idea is not to ask how we take ourselves out of the equation entirely. It’s more about saying, “We both share this naturally, so let me help as someone who’s maybe been through it for longer or has more life experience.” How can we share this in a healthy way?
MB: Yeah. And I don't think there’s a perfect answer.
PDB: That’s what makes it great: It’s not perfect. I don’t want to see my mentor as a perfect person. That doesn’t help me learn from them. I want to see them in moments of brokenness and vulnerability. That makes me feel that it’s okay for me to go through it too. Mentors don’t have it all figured out. That’s such a lie.
MB: It really is. It reminds me of the moment you realize a parent or a teacher is another human—that they’re not on a pedestal where they don’t struggle with things. And that’s healing.
On How Grief Makes Us Feel Alive
PDB: It’s an epiphany.
MB: Yeah. It’s a beautiful exchange. Especially with grief, and especially right now, because of the way that everybody’s grieving—personally, globally, and collectively. It’s vital to acknowledge it because, in a strange way, grief makes us feel alive.
PDB: 100%. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever said it in this way. And I don’t know if I’m going to get it right, but I do think that over the past five years, there have been moments where I’ve never felt more alive than after going through this intense grief.
MB: Yes. And leaning into this idea that grief makes us feel alive, I wanted to ask you about your spoken word poem, “Butterfly Knife” from In Between the Lines. I wondered if grief always comes in twos—there’s always the griever and the grieved. Maybe there’s a kind of carrying that happens there. But then, I noticed there are actually two butterfly knives in the image for the track. We started our conversation with butterflies, which symbolize growth and rebirth. So I’m curious what the process of putting that poem together was like, considering how all of these things are related?
PDB: Yeah. It’s everything we've talked about: This practice of carrying multiple things at once in a world where we want something so packaged and easily understood. I think of the workshops I do with grief, and this journey toward understanding that we can hold all aspects of grief at the same time. And “Butterfly Knife” is that, too. It’s the hurting and the healing. The joy and the grief, the gratitude and the grief. A lot of my work is constantly asking: What about this, and this, and this, and this, and this? Can this all be at the same time? And I get how that can be hard to understand and hold, but it’s such a liberating feeling when you realize that we can—that we’re able to. Once we do, we can see love and care in their most human forms, and the world gets better. I really do [believe that].
On Specific Projects & What’s Next
MB: Agreed. I was definitely a better person after reading/listening to that poem. Thank you. And I suppose the very last thing I wanted to give you space to talk about is a few specific projects you’re working on: Empty Spaces, The Rebel House, and Youth Poetry Slam.
PDB: It’s impossible for a full departure from the themes we’ve been talking about, but yes:
Empty Spaces is a grief writing workshop series. I’ll run it again in the fall, and it’s funded by the Toronto Arts Council. It’s another beautiful byproduct of my own personal experiences with grief, and how I’ve been opening up to the community to help people use storytelling as a tool to explore their own grief. I’ve run it a few times now, and it’s been amazing. As someone who does grief counselling, too, it’s another level of healing when you get to witness other people’s grief consistently, and then watch them alchemize it into art or storytelling. If I could spend the rest of my life doing that, I would.
The Rebel House is my residency where, as a commentary on the oppressive, destructive history of museums, I like to reactivate and sometimes reclaim the space by introducing stories by folks who are often in the margins, or are racialized storytellers. That manifests as showcases, workshops, and other pieces in the museum and around the museum space. That’s happening now into next month, and into the fall as well with some dinner shows.
Finally, the Toronto Youth Poetry Slam. It’s another platform I’ve been running for years, where young poets like me look for a place to say something—a place for others to witness their stories. We just had our festival a couple of weeks ago, and it was awesome: 200 people from across the city came to support youth sharing poetry. They’re so talented. We’ll be back again in September.
As an adult, I know what I needed when I was younger. Now, I’m part of a team of awesome people who are going through these same realizations, creating platforms for other young people to have that opportunity.
MB: Oh, I love that. And as you were talking, I thought of something we briefly touched on earlier: How important it is to document our lives and help others document their lives, whether that’s through poetry or archival work (such as in the museum), and especially for immigrant communities and people whose voices aren’t heard. That is grief work. I love how all of [your projects] intersect, and the role that you have as both a creator and a guide for how to approach grief from different angles.
PDB: That was a great way to tie this conversation together with a ribbon. Thanks a lot for doing this.
MB: Of course.
About Patrick de Belen
Patrick de Belen is a Toronto-based Filipino-Canadian storyteller, arts educator, spoken word poet, writer, and filmmaker. His work—spanning poetry, film, and multidisciplinary projects—delves into themes of mental health, Filipino identity, liberation, community, grief, and healing.
Renowned for his poetic collaborations with the Toronto Raptors, the NFL, CBC, and more, Patrick has released two spoken word EPs and written/directed multiple cine-poems. He made history as the youngest poet to win a national poetry slam championship and has been honored with both the Canadian Poet of Honour and Youth Poet of Honour titles, along with several other storytelling accolades. Over the years, he has shared the stage with artists like The Roots, Shane Koyczan, and The Halluci Nation.
His short documentary, Tell Me A Story About Someone You Miss, was a finalist in the 2023 TVO Short Doc Competition, and he is currently in post-production for his debut feature documentary, Last Note—the recipient of the inaugural Kalabaw Bursary from the Reel Asian Film Festival.
Beyond his artistic work, Patrick is a dedicated educator and community builder, collaborating with schools, libraries, non-profits, addiction centers, jails, and mental health organizations to champion diverse storytelling and create space for voices often unheard.
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