I am hard on myself about grief. I’m mad that I let it derail my life for 15 years, and I don’t expect to ever truly forgive myself for that. Which, of course, is the worst possible thing to do to yourself, because holding that kind of thing over our own heads is as self-destructive as the behavior you’re mad about in the first place.

Grief logic: it doesn’t have to make sense.

While I take ownership of those actions, of those “lost years,” I spread a bit of the blame out onto society in general. There are no avenues for grief these days, outside of religious practices or memorial stickers on cars. I think of Victorian mourning hair art, which was the practice of using a deceased loved one’s hair to make jewelry or embroidered works. It strikes us as morbid today, but it served a purpose by allowing people to create and wear/display mementos and, more importantly, to focus time, attention, and love on the act of creating them.

But I had nothing. Being an atheist, I found religious practices alluring but ultimately useless. In the end, I lied to myself by thinking I could get by with doing nothing. But by trying NOT to grieve, through having no outlet to process my grief or share the experience of mourning, I turned it inward and it went sour.

Kirsty Mitchell, though, did not let social mores stand in the way of her grief. I discovered her work accidentally (thank you, RSS feeds!), and was mesmerized by her ethereal fantasy photographs, which are all in memory of her mother who died of cancer in 2008. If you haven’t seen her work, I encourage – nay, demand – that you check out her website. Be prepared to stay a while.

I wish I had been as brave as Mitchell, willing to step into the grief process creatively and with a dedication that not only results in beautiful art but also a heartbreaking, profound memorial to a dead person she still loves, and always will.

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