On Grief and Loss and How We Navigate Them

This is the beginning project that will include essays, narrative prose, poetry and artwork. I hope to form this collection into a series. 

I'd like to spend time looking at grief and loss and how we, as a culture, tend to move through it. It will be a discovery process for me. I don't have an idea of how long it will take or where it will go exactly. Today is only a beginning. What I do know is that grief and loss are a universal experience. I have come to believe also that, while it's a universal experience, it is most often not done well in our culture. 

I'd like to learn how to do it better. I'm using art as a beginning point for learning and expressing as well as working through grief. I'll create art as a process and then will write something that fleshes that artwork out more fully. I hope you'll consider following along. I think the content will have the potential to be helpful to many people, especially as we are collectively grieving a year of loss and heartbreak all around the world. With that in mind, I invite you to widely share this work in the hopes that more of us may find release from the grief our bodies have been carrying.

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The Edge of Grief 16.5 x 21.25

On Mother’s Day, 1982, I awoke with anticipation and joy. I had carefully chosen a gift to present to my Mom on her special day. I’d wrapped it carefully. I even woke up early to cut some roses from the rose garden and placed them inside Mother’s favorite vase. It was going to be a special day. I was 9 years old, just about to turn 10. It was a special time of life for a young girl.

I sat waiting at the kitchen table with my gift, having heard my mother and father getting dressed for the morning. I would surprise her with my offerings. Eager, excited, happy…..like kids often are when there is a celebration at hand.

Mother came out of her bedroom…..alone.

My father had left us, sometime in the night. He was gone. He wasn’t coming home again. Ever. Divorce was the plan.

He hadn’t said goodbye. He hadn’t said anything. He never did discuss that choice or that season with me, except to say that it was my mother's fault.

There I sat, at the end of the table with the elements of celebration in front of me and grief pouring into my young body, filling in all the joyful places with despair. Slumped shoulders, dead eyes. The smile, the energy, the hope of a beautiful day full of yellow sunlight and strolls in the woods wiped from my thoughts and replaced by a blackness I had no idea how to name, much less walk through.

Looking back, I certainly needed someone to lead me through that pain and loss. But in 1982, were people even thinking about such things? So often, people have no idea how to sit with pain of their own, much less how to hold it for someone else until that person knows how to hold it themselves.

What would it have looked like to process such pain at 9 years old? I’m not certain. As I imagine it, I think it would center around acknowledgment of the level of loss such and experience is for a child. There might have been someone to help me direct my anger appropriately. Instead, I laid it all at my mother’s feet, since that is where my father, whom I adored, was laying it.

But it was my father who left, my father who never bothered to say goodbye, to explain what was happening,  who avoided the responsibility to financially support us until forced. It was my father who had found another woman to replace us. It was my father who abandoned us.

So grief lodged in my little girl heart and has festered there for decades. Until I began just recently to learn how this happens in the body and that it’s essential to excise those wounds and let the light back in.

There’s a lot of color here because grief is never just one color. Grief comes in many hues and intensities. Grief shows up as anger, and pretend joy and satisfaction. Grief shows up as that thing which we say we’ve moved beyond, but the reality is that we don’t even know what ‘move beyond’ means.

As I painted through this piece, I intentionally allowed myself to feel what 9 year old me felt, and what 10, 11, 12,15,18, 25, 36 and 48 year old me feel. The grief that I’d held in my body through so many years came bubbling out. I thought about the boxes where I’d thought grief was meant to show up. I thought about how I was meant to be ‘over’ that grief because it was so far in the past. I thought about how grief has edges that cozy right up next to joy and hope and celebration. And how those edges are hard and sharp and will cut you wide open, will leave you to bleed and die if you aren’t careful.

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This is one painting, in what I intend to be a series.

My desire is to work through some of my own unexpressed, unsorted grief. I am also inviting others who could use a model for this idea to unpack the pain of events long past or just last week. My ultimate desire is to share my own process of releasing the pain of grief from my own body through writing and images, poems and whatever else presents itself.

In the end there will be a collection of work that may be somehow presented as a unit. That part remains to be seen. If you are interested in the project, making a purchase or have questions or comments, wish to purchase a piece or just want to connect, I do hope you’ll get in touch. Contact me on my Facebook, via email at scarletbird72@gmail.com or through my store at www.ursulaschneider.art