Karolina Jonderko - " Portrait With My Mother "

I have learned that there is no time line for grieving. When my first husband died at the age of 26, while in my last year of University in 1980, I excelled in my art work. Creating art helped me to grieve. Many artists use there work as a vehicle to process their grief. It's something I think for many artists is a natural inclination, even if we are not fully conscious of this at the time. Creativity is a conduit for processing and communicating deep heart ache.

Karolina Jonderko I think, found this to be true for her, inadvertently with no intention of sharing what she was doing after the death of her mother, who had been very sick with cancer. She began to take a series of photographs of herself, in her mothers clothes. To some this might seem morbid, and perhaps not being able to let go. There is never a set formula in knowing how to grieve if we have not experienced it personally, in such a profound way, and it think it is different for all of us, though we can identify with many of the feelings.

When those we love die, it is profound, death is profound, as is life, neither are easy but both can be very beautiful. I believe mortality is what gives our lives meaning.

A few years back I learned about Caitlyn Doughty a member of The Order of The Good Death, and a mortician in Los Angeles, Califonia. Her approach and attitude toward death I believe we can all learn and benefit from, as our society has kept death at arms length. We don't want to talk about it.

People need to be allowed to grieve in what ever way they wish. However suppression of feelings after a period of time becomes repression, which is toxic to our health and happiness. I can't think of any more proactive way to communicate emotion, than expressing ourselves through creating art work.

Here's the link to an interview with Karolina Jonderko about her exhibit of photography, Portrait With My Mother.

Life Death Life Cycle

Caitlin Doughty is a Los Angeles, CA. mortician and a writer who started The Order of The Good Death in 2011. I heard an interview with her on CBC radio for a second time. The first time I didn't listen as intently as I did on this occasion. Why I paid close attention today was because a close friend's brother-in-law died just a few days prior to Christmas. I came to the realization that I think deeply at Christmas about those that we love and loose to death, under very difficult and painful circumstances, that perhaps we can ever imagine.

Amidst the Christmas festivity, and celebration of the birth of the Christ Child,  present to me, is a pervading sense and reminder of death. This may sound morbid, but I have come to realize this is all part and parcel of  cycle of life. It is what Jungian analyst, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola  refers to, in the story about Skeleton Woman, as being  the life-death-life cycle.  There is life after death I believe. I am not just talking about Heaven or the after life, but the kind of life we choose to live when we can face our fears surrounding death, confronting and accepting our mortality.

 I am someone who has personally experienced a lot of death with the loss of a husband at the young age of 27, loosing my mother in 1995, after one year of sobriety, and then ten years later loosing my father and my older brother within two months of one another. In considering what I have lost and what I have gained, I am amazed and so grateful to be able to celebrate on January 2nd, 2013, nineteen years of contented sobriety.

The death of my loved ones has given me an appreciation for life and a wisdom that I would never have otherwise. I learned many hard lessons from death and continue to do so. What I have gleaned from these lessons, I have to share, pay it forward, in hopes of perhaps helping another, the way others have so generously helped me.

I remember many years ago reading, Love and Will by Rollo May. He makes some profound statements that have long resonated with me, about the relationship between Love and Death. This is clarified for me is his quotation from  a letter written by Abraham Maslow, who was recuperating from a heart attack.

" The confrontation with death-and the reprieve from it-makes everything look so precious, so sacred, so beautiful that I feel more strongly than ever the impulse to love it. My river has never looked so beautiful....Death, and its ever present possibility makes love, passionate love, more possible. I wonder if we could love passionately, if ecstasy would be possible at all, if we knew we'd never die."
                                           
"Death is always in the shadow of the delight of love."

He speaks as well of the other side of the death and love relationship.

 " The obsession with sex serves to cover up contemporary man's fear of death."

At one time death was not so much at arms length as it is today in the twenty first century, much to our own detriment.

When I first came to the realization I am somewhat preoccupied with contemplating thoughts about death, especially around this time of year, at Christmas, I didn't really want to admit this to myself. However today, after closely and intently listening and reading what Caitlin Doughty has to say, I can  better embrace my thoughts and feelings about death and mortality. I now understand  and know this is healthy and normal considering what my life experience has been.

Caitlin says, "Many of us have thoughts of death, but we don't see them to the end. We get stuck in the loops, reliving the scary part over and over but never the resolution."