Hello, my name is Colleen Moss and I'm going to tell you a story today about grief and
about how painting helped me work through that grief.
I'm sharing the story with you today because I'm hoping to bring grief out into the open
to talk about something that almost no one wants to talk about, to give grief a voice
in a way.
In doing this, I'm hoping that will help others who are maybe going through this same experience.
And I'm also hoping that it may encourage those of you who are going through an experience
like this to use the creative process to help you through this.
Four years ago, on September 11, 2008, my world was completely shattered.
On that day, my beloved husband Tom Wallen died of stomach cancer.
He had only been diagnosed five and a half weeks before that.
For many months after my husband died, I felt as though the pain and grief and despair that
I felt would never lift.
I was pretty sure I wouldn't survive and, in fact, I in many ways didn't want to survive.
My husband was my entire life.
He was everything to me, and it was my greatest fear that he would leave before me.
I had felt in many ways like I had fallen through an abyss.
With my husband's death, I had been thrown into the ranks of millions who had walked
this terrible road before me.
Grief is one of the most universal of all human experiences.
To love someone, to be a wife, a husband, a parent, a child, a friend, a brother, a sister
means that you will most likely have your own experience with grief one day.
Yet despite the fact that it is something that almost everybody experiences at least
once in their lifetime, grief is something that has been driven into the shadows in our
culture.
And because of that, it is something that has to be suffered in solitude and isolation
for those going through it.
Because of this, I felt desperately alone in my grief and needed to find a voice for
it.
Several people suggested that I try journaling, but for me, words seemed completely insufficient.
My grief seemed to be beyond words.
I'm a painter, and prior to my husband's death, I painted landscapes.
After my husband died, I couldn't bring myself to paint anything at all, much less the landscape.
In fact, I found myself completely overcome with inertia, unable to do hardly anything
at all except things that I needed to do for my basic survival.
Finally after a period of almost eight months, I picked up a paintbrush.
When I approached the canvas, I wasn't sure what I was going to paint, I just sat down
to paint.
And what came out was a picture of a heart.
I later called it a wounded heart.
Once I started painting the wounded hearts, I couldn't stop.
Over a period of the next three years, I painted twelve canvases of wounded hearts.
After each painting, I felt as though a little piece of paint had been released from my heart
and placed onto the canvas.
These paintings served as a catharsis, they served as a communication, as a voice for
my grief, and ultimately they helped me survive.
Looking back now in these twelve paintings, I can see that they clearly depict my personal
journey through grief.
They served as a documentation of my fight for survival and a documentation of the transformation
of grief in the healing process.
It's now been four years since my husband died, but my journey through grief is far
from over.
As time passes, grief changes form, but it remains nonetheless.
And although I'm no longer painting hearts, I'm still painting my grief, and I still
find the process therapeutic.
It still helps me express feelings that can't be expressed in any other way.
It also provides feedback to me about emotions that I may not realize I'm experiencing.
I find and have found since painting all of my wounded hearts and the canvases that I
paint now, I find that the paintbrush sometimes knows what the mind does not, and therefore
it helps me understand feelings and issues that I may not have realized that I was experiencing
or struggling with until I see them expressed on the canvas.
I've shared this story with you in the hopes that I might help one of my fellow travelers
in this journey through grief.
And to help you know that you're not alone and that there is hope and that expressing
yourself through the creative process, whether repainting or drawing or photography or writing,
is one way to help you get through this terrible journey.
Thank you.
