Grief as a companion

I’ve written about grief, I’ve painted over wounds. The cliché of the tortured artist has in my opinion, become annoyingly true. The way I see it, and I wish it were not the case, pain seems to be much louder than happiness. When times are smooth, when the days are filled with the lovely things, they whisper pleasure, but when pain is felt, it screams. It becomes all encompassing, even when small. Like a pesky little cold sore in the mouth can completely consume our every thought and entire day. So what happens when the pain is much larger and more devastating? Yes, you will heal, but the journey forward will forever change you.

These pieces are a compilation of 3am wake up calls. The gold leaf foil woke me up at 3am as a way to depict the shimmering shiny surfaces we see in each other before dipping into the deeper pools of what often looks much darker. I recently got coffee with a friend, and as I was venting, I kept repeating an unfinished sentence that he quietly jotted down in his notebook as I rambled. After a while, he showed me the note pad scribbled “You’re not still?…”. I realized I was clearly very frustrated with the time period assigned to grieving. There’s a belief that time will heal all wounds, but that is a lie. Time covers. Time scabs over. Time buries. The wound always there beneath the exterior glitter. It wakes up with you, and walks about your day with you, and speaks when most inconvenient. The assumption that it will someday leave is wrong. I wish we would emphasize that it will shape us instead.

All of this sounds fairly bleak and I don’t mean for it to. I’ve come to find so much beauty in how deep our own pools go beneath the surface. Our most unifying human experience, yet usually the most isolating. All of my favorite people in this world have gulped pain and I asked myself why that is. The wound is nothing to be grateful for, but what the wound produced are often our most valuable super powers. To the degree someone has felt life’s burn, often becomes the degree they try to extinguish someone else’s fire. Empathy has been one of my most valuable gifts from grief.

To sum up an already lengthy rant, these paintings are about the life altering companionship of pain and loss and how they form who we are. Beautifully deep, broken, and messy.

“The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them.”

― Francis Weller