As an artist, it's an intimate and risky exchange to make something based on someone else’s grief. But I’d rather attempt to connect and engage than to turn away.
I had my children young, keeping in mind that my own mother died 46. Now I’m 46, missing my mother, grieving my 12-year-old son, and also happily, unexpectedly pregnant.
We may try size up our grief to justify the depth of our pain, or to remind ourselves that it could be worse. But trying to determine a hierarchy does no one any good.
In the year since cancer took my little girl's life, I find myself saying 'I'm sorry.' For not being able to save her, for surviving her death, and for simply being 'sorrowful.'
Between the time we decided to stop treatment and the time my baby son died, I felt desperately alone — pulled between my ‘cancer family’ still fighting to save their children and the bereaved families on the other side of this battle.
A few weeks before Thanksgiving, my 12-year-old son went out to play in the rain and never came home. That year, everything about the holiday just felt wrong.
