As you probably already knew, the change of grief can significantly alter everything about us. It can’t be helped, it’s too big a trauma for us to not be altered in some way. We didn’t ask for this change, of course, but there it is. I know I have changed a lot but it can be hard to describe to others exactly how. Sometimes, when losses happen, you’re left wondering who you even are anymore, such as in the case of spousal loss, because you most likely based much of your existence on life with that person. So, if you don’t even know who you are anymore, then how can anyone tell what ends up changing? But one example might be that you’d like to know if you’re any better than you were when grief first started. I often wonder this same thing whenever triggers continue to show up for me because those can make you think you are not any better at all.
This is where art can be of assistance. Because I do so much art, it’s been a way for me to pinpoint some of the changes. It’s been a little fascinating to pull out things I’ve done over the years and see exactly what I was feeling in a pretty clear and concise manner. If you start doing some of the activities on this site and keep it up for a while, you, too will be able to see how you change through pictures. It’ll tell you something about yourself and it’s something that can be shared with others too. Well, only if you want to share, that is.
I am sharing some work I have done over the years, beginning with the time I was with my late husband then progressing into anticipatory grief. After that, I move to the grief after I lost him, and onto the art I am currently creating. Sometimes, it can be more helpful to demonstrate anything through visual images rather than just trying to talk about it or describe it. And when it comes to something concerning grief, perhaps you will find something to relate to through one of the images.
Phase # 1 – Birds n’ Blooms
I start this artistic journey at the moment before anticipatory grief began to really haunt me. This time period was roughly between 2010-2013. Things weren’t starting to feel hopeless yet. There had been some bad moments, yes, but everyone around us, especially the medical field, still had major encouragement that my late husband, Charlie, would indeed recover from stupid, mean cancer. I believed it because why not? I had just come back to art after being largely absent from it for several years due to pregnancy, birth and Charlie’s cancer diagnosis. I had dabbled in a few things but mostly just out of a need to play around with my art supplies again. Plus, I kept receiving advice that I should take a few minutes every day to do something I liked to do, even if it could only be for 10 minutes. Obviously, I decided that something would be art.
During this time, I was totally filled with the idea that our family would persevere because we were a pretty solid, connected
unit. Charlie was very, very much into being a father and he just filled my heart with the way he interacted with our children. He had a very positive energy towards them and they just adored him. I loved that I had this kind of man to be their father and that this was all mine to enjoy. I was sure that with as much star like rainbow energy that he had, nothing could possibly take him down. I honestly believed that someone with that much love could not be destroyed by anything. I figured cancer would eventually give up on him and say, “Let’s move out boys, because even sunshine gets out of Charlie’s way!”
So, this is where I found myself compulsively painting and drawing flowers and birds. These two subjects, at the time, just completely captured and expressed my own positivity and delight that only good things were ahead for us. Flowers, to me, represented love, hope, renewal and the blooming of all that is cherishable to human beings. And I felt like birds represented life, new beginnings, peace and flight towards freedom.
Phase # 2 – The Cancer Flowers
In March 2013, my mother died suddenly. I had spoken to her merely days before and she’d been totally fine. So, for her to be fine one day and then gone the next, had the effect of knocking a hole clear through my heart. She was only 52 but had had Type 1 diabetes, which wound up creating some complications for her during a night she’d been completely alone. I couldn’t believe that she’d vanished…just like that. She’d been there for the birth of our fourth child and now, she wasn’t going to get to see him grow up. She wouldn’t get to see any of our kids grow up. She was always so excited about being a grandmother and our children already had a special name for her.
I had some difficulty doing any art after this. And on top of it, Charlie’s condition was worsening. This was during the time that it became pretty evident that he was not going to heal from the radionecrosis that his treatments has caused for him. He was confined to a feeding tube and was slowly having less and less energy. But Charlie told me to channel my sad feelings back into art. He suggested taking the bad feelings and creating something beautiful out of them. So, I returned to making flowers but I changed my approach to them. Instead of realism, as I was doing before, I started making these happy face flowers. 
A lot of people complimented them, so I decided to try to open an online shop and sell them in order to help with the slowly mounting medical bills we were collecting. Charlie had been laid off at work but was afraid for me to work outside the home because of his condition. We had discovered that doctors in Europe were completing effective treatments for severe radionecrosis that were on the way to being approved in the U. S but it would be a long time before we had access to them here. So, I wanted to help raise money to get Charlie over to Europe before it was too late. This was the remainder of 2013, 2014 and a little of 2015. I was beginning to have some severe anticipatory grief. My mother had died, we had four small children, neither one of us could work outside the home and I was beginning to be fearful for what exactly what was in store for us.
I still have some of these flowers. You can see a lot of them in my old DeviantArt account here. I keep the ones I have left in a drawer and look at them occasionally. They look like and represent the last of the hope I had that something good had to happen for our now lost family. However, despite their happy appearance, I still look at these flowers and often think of them as The Cancer Flowers.
Phase # 3 – The Abstract Response to Death
At some point, I’m not exactly sure when, because things really began to blur for me more than ever around 2015, I quit making the Cancer Flowers. Charlie’s condition had deteriorated to a point in which I felt was approaching the event horizon. I had no time to make anything, only to care for him and our children. The event horizon is the edge of a black hole in outer space. It is the point of no return. The point at which nothing, not even light, can escape. I was now having severe nightmares every night. I could barely eat or sleep. All I really remember about this period, which was the rest of 2015 and all the way until November 11, 2016, was a devastating swamp of pain, sorrow and heartbreak like I had never known before.
It finally came to its conclusion in November 2016. Charlie was gone and there really was nothing further I could do. There was nothing anyone could do. I looked at art, if at all, with a sense of great detachment. No subject really appealed to me on any level. Flowers meant nothing. Birds were stupid. Get the color yellow away from me, with its sunshiny goodness. I didn’t want much to do with any of that.
I had always made what I liked to think of as happy, positive art. I had always thought that if I was going to make or craft
something, why not create something beautiful for people to look at? Who wants to look at dark, stormy art that makes you feel like there are monsters waiting under your bed or in the closet?
But something began to change here. I could not create happy art very well anymore. In fact, I had absolutely no idea what to create. And as I am writing this, I still cannot produce art from that super-positive-everything-will-work-out-for-the-best mindset that I was in before. Something in me was too different and it was here that I began to create abstract art.
I had never been a big abstract art fan before. I mean, I liked to look at other people’s abstract art and I liked many pieces but I wasn’t a fan of doing it myself. Well, this period, the period following Charlie’s death, marked that change in viewpoint for me. I found the benefit of creating art that had nothing to do (or very little to do) with realism. I hated realism for a while because it was a reminder of reality and reality sucked. And since I had no idea what to create anyway, abstract art was the perfect way to express something inside myself without any kind of solid definition. The first month after Charlie died, I wound up making my first abstract painting to relieve some of the feelings I was having. Then later, I made a series of abstract paintings starting in February 2017 for my own personal self therapy. To be honest, I’m not completely sure how long it went on. That’s because it sort of blurred into the next period.
Phase # 4 – The Random Period
I had always had more of a focus when it came to art. I would pick a subject or style and stick to it for a while. But at some point, I started having trouble doing any of that. (I’m still not sure I’m really past that.) Sometime in the fall of 2017, I began to gravitate from abstract to random. One day I might create abstract, the next, I would do a children’s book type illustration, two days after that, I’d start on a realistic graphite portrait. It was really weird.
I started seeing a collection of my past art being…well, regurgitated, is the only word I can think of to describe it. For example, I made a colored pencil piece featuring flowers (shown here), but this time, the flowers were in outer space. Then I made an illustration that started in the style of the Cancer Flowers (you know, sort of kid like and innocent) but became a black cat silhouette against a Halloweeny moon.
It was during this time, that grief was beginning to catch up with me. Before that, I’d
been able to distract myself pretty well because once Charlie died, I was too busy with moving, finding work and doing endless paperwork and all the troublesome things that happen when you lose your spouse. Also, I had probably channeled a great deal of grief into my Abstract period plus I had a journal I wrote in consistently. When it was no longer enough, I finally started grief therapy. I did a few individual sessions and joined a support group for people who had lost their spouses. It was here that I met who would eventually become my new partner, Michael. However, that took a while. I left the group at some point and moved away again, still trying to escape grief. Michael gifted me some Blackwing graphite pencils as a going away gift and I used them to create a realistic owl portrait. 
I became very attracted to owls as one of my favorite subjects. I identified with their symbolism. They were intuitive night lurkers and they represented wisdom and mystery. I also got the same feelings with outer space and the moon and black cats. Somehow, all of that resonated with me.
Phase # 5 – The Art of Grief
In this period, I moved yet again, back to where I was before. I’ll most likely explain my moving craze in more detail in other articles. Ultimately, it’s all grief related. But it was during this time that my relationship with Michael progressed from friends to more. We’d been friends for a year by now and had continued speaking through text and phone even after I moved away. And that was one reason I moved back. Michael was giving me more emotional support and understanding than anyone else I was around. The other reason was that my grandmother was deteriorating and being closer to her again felt important though obviously filled with more grief.
I had thought finding a way to love again would obliterate all grief forever but it didn’t. It definitely helped to find someone
who could understand what losing a spouse felt like and someone with whom I had a lot in common with and was compatible with personality wise. But I still struggled with grief, guilt and regret for the original dreams that would and could never be. There was this thought that this new life only existed because people had died, which feels unsettling.
It was during this period that I lost my grandmother. Also, something else happened in that same week that was also heartbreaking. I can’t talk about that something else right now and I’m not sure if I ever will be able to. But these two events forced me right back into grief therapy. And I’m still there.
This time I stuck more with individual therapy rather than support groups. And one of the things that my therapist started me on was using art for grief. She asked me to show her what grief felt like to me. And that’s where all this next artwork comes from. Grief had been triggered once again with the loss of my grandmother. All sorts of feelings that I hadn’t dealt with from losing my mother and Charlie resurfaced as well.
This is the time in my life where I became aware of using art for the expression of difficult emotions. Before this, I had only ever done things that were happy or had an obvious focus to them, like a portrait or still life. I never thought to make images that reflected an inner reality that wasn’t happy all the time. I never gave myself permission to make art like that.
But now, I allowed myself to do that and was surprised to find it was a relief.
Phase # 6 – ?
This marks where I am now. And to be perfectly honest, I’m not totally sure where that is. I have moved into a combination of phases again. I have these owls, which I think mimic my Cancer Flowers and make me feel weird sometimes. I also like making watercolor illustrations that are cute and playful. I have begun making art journals where I express my inner reality freely, which is often still tinged with grief. (I will often use those images as examples for art activities on this site). And I also like to make somewhat realistic landscapes in oil now (I’ve shown a few below). The landscapes are new and sometimes the most comforting for reasons I’m not sure of either.
But perhaps the biggest difference and addition to my artwork is the creation of this website, Grieving Arts. A way to show people how art can be used to handle difficult emotions, especially for something like grief, which appears to never leave us once it finds us.
Conclusion
It was interesting to lay all of this out for you and go through my artwork in order to supply you with some kind of demonstration of the changes that life, especially grief in life, can create in a person. I only hope I didn’t just confuse you even more and that you found the process or the imagery relatable in some way.
Perhaps you, too, started out full of hope or on that upper end of the feeling scale only to find that grief both took and added to parts of your psyche as time went on. Maybe you simply started as a person who had a life where everything was just normal and going as it should, before everything was altered drastically. If you could put those experiences and feelings into pictures, what do you think you would pick?
If you have already found that art or journaling has helped you in some way, please let us know in the comments below!