Painting My Way Through Loss

An excerpt adapted from Remembering Myself

By the time my mother was dying, years of stress and overwork had collapsed me. I had closed my business, given up my apartment, and moved in with Tupper. My friends—many of them also clients—disappeared when I could no longer be strong for them. My son was leaving for college and angry with me. I was losing my mother, my health, my work, my friends, even my sense of who I was.

Everything I thought of as me had dissolved.

When I heard she was in her final days, Tupper and I boarded a plane to New York, hoping we might reach her in time. But when the plane landed, I looked at my phone and saw the message. She was already gone.

At the funeral, I felt her presence enter the room, my father beside her. In that moment I understood something I wasn’t prepared for: I was utterly alone.

I was an orphan now. Motherless in the way only death can make real. At the time, there was no meaning in it, no light. Only absence.

The only thing left was painting.

So I painted my way through loss, grief, and terror. I wrote poetry. I wept. Painting and writing became the threads that carried me when everything else had fallen away.

In time, I began to understand that painting was more than a way to survive grief. It was a bridge. Through the canvas, something deeper kept speaking. My mother’s silenced voice was there, but so was my own. The images carried what I didn’t yet have words for.

Painting became the place where loss began turning into remembrance.

This piece is part of Stories from Remembering Myself and is adapted from the book Remembering Myself: A Journey Through the Threads of Time.

Learn more about Remembering Myself.