I remember clearly, days after my sister died, disoriented with sadness, I looked into the wild and serious eyes of a trusted friend.
“You can’t get around grief,” she said. “You have to go through it.”
It sounds easy enough, but in my mind’s eye, the “it” she referred to was completely foreign. It sounded like she was saying casually, just go down through the sewer system. I knew I needed to go through, but it felt like an invitation into cruel, unusual, and very stinky punishment.
She wasn’t wrong, and neither was I.
Like so many tricky things in life that start out with big feelings, grief, at the end of time, is a practice. I’ve added a lot of things into the practice category of my mind. Hope, forgiveness, and love being among them. I’m okay at them some days, and terrible at in others. I practice, not planning to get really good at any of them. I feet a bit like a person who never wanted, ever, to play baseball, being forced to join a team. So, grief fits in that list perfectly.
“Back in the Day” Mixed media on canvas, 2026
While I was NOT enthused about this process, it did feel like a mandatory way to navigate my strong feelings in response to my sister’s death. It seemed like going through grief, or, indulging in unhealthy habits to numb all those outrageous feelings were the only two options presenting themselves. It seemed that understanding grief was the healthier, and harder option (why does healthy so often = hard?! Boooo). I knew almost immediately, making art would help make this journey less daunting.
So, I’ve been working on art that is thematically linked to my sister’s life for a year. It’s a way to help me remember her words, and express the difficulties of remembering a life well lived, as it fades into the abyss of the past. I knew that if I was going to mimic the trickiness of grief, I needed to explore elements in art that were unfamiliar to me, to express a kind of grappling that could not be done with techniques I’ve mastered.
Photos have always been her thing — she was a photographer, after all. So I decided to try and grapple with photos. I wanted to use them as a metaphor for getting to know something she loved and cared about, to take on something I’ve never felt comfortable with.
“Like Moira Rose” Mixed media on canvas, work in progress, 2026
Here are my first photo based works.
Before I made these, I imagined them.
That sounds obvious, but in my art practice, a lot of my work is an exploration of the present moment and a relationship to gesture and improvisation. So this has been different. I remember her doing that too — imagining possibilities. She would tell me about an idea she really wanted to try. Even that — visioning an idea and hoping it will work, is something new I’m taking on because of her.
I gave myself time. I sat and imagined all these images, translucent, overlapping, juxtaposed. It seemed to look like the wobbly nature of grief; sometimes like this, sometimes like that. The images represent memories, yes, but distorted through a lens of forgetting, of not being able to picture everything clearly. The longer I think about it, memories almost always have a kind of distortion. But I hold my distorted fragments of the past close, even still.
I want to remember — but I need to notice the way that my remembering is flawed.
This is reality. This is part of the texture of loss.
It’s a foreign, infuriating material — it doesn’t do what I want it to do.
Processing grief seems to have many phases — and long after the psychological reckoning, I find I still need to pick things up and feel things in my hands to practice grieving. It’s not something that goes away. I guess it’s the transition between fresh grief, and finding ways to remember intentionally. At first, it was the emotional impulse that grabbed be and dragged me into processing. There was no other way to be, than to do this work.
“Try as I Might” mixed media on canvas, work in progress, 2026
Now it’s a conscious decision. To step into the space of remembering.
I come prepared to hold feelings with a wide array of art materials.
When my friend told me I had to go through grief, I imagined going under an arch - through it for a split second, and I’d be on the other side. Now, I see it’s a kind of invisible, translucent, tunnel. The light filtering through is hazy, and — if I let it be for even just a second—kind of peaceful. I can see out of it, but I can feel the walls all around me, all the time. I’m going through it, like she just like she said. I don’t think I will ever get out of it —and you know what?
“Original Four” mixed media on canvas, work in progress, 2026
In a strange way, that’s okay with me.