When people are asked which emotion is  their favourite; which is the one that they would like to wake up to each day, they invariably will say, love.  And indeed, nothing else makes our heart flip and sing all at once.  No other emotion stirs such passion and compassion at the same time.  When in love, the nights fill with dreams of that person and then slip into glorious awakenings, ready for another full day of thinking about and being with that one.

Falling in love can include a spousal- type relationship, a newborn, a newly adopted child, or an animal.  In various degrees, it also is a large part of our relationship with our parents, siblings, other relatives and friends.  It's a wonderful,  incredible chapter of being alive!

But in this yin yang world, the flip side of intense love, is intense grief.  There is no escape, no way to avoid it.  One of the party will die, or in some way, leave the relationship.  The trick is to make the most of the experience, to live the feelings to the fullest, to allow ourselves to heal from the inside out.  It's difficult, in fact, depending on the relationship we had with the deceased, it can be by far the hardest thing we've ever had to go through.  But go through it we must.  Grief cannot be neatly piled to the side and ignored while we carry on with life as if nothing has changed.  Everything has changed and it will not be snubbed.  If we do, we most certainly will pay for it later, usually in physical symptoms and often with disease, both of the body and mind.

Grief is a large part of everyday life.  Every time we do not get something that we really wanted, from a favourite toy, to a job; each time we lose a relationship, starting as children with a friend and carrying into adulthood with friendships, boy and girlfriends, animals, careers, a disability; each of those is a grief and must be treated as such.  For most of us, it is a gentle climb, but for others, the hill becomes suddenly steep, in our minds, much too early.  When children lose a sibling or a parent, their innate sense of how to grieve is a wondrous thing to watch.  That is, as long as the adults do not get in the way.  Children will really "feel" the emotions.  They will cry and scream or they will sit in their rooms quietly stroking their dog.  Any way that they handle it is exactly the way they should handle it.  As long as we do not force our expectations onto the child, they tend to do just fine.  The problems arise when the adults themselves refuse to grieve, thus setting up short and long term problems for all.

My husband and I learned about grief when our twin boys, Joshua and Cole, were born without kidneys and died within hours.  It was unexpected and I had also just gone through an extremely difficult birth (interlocking twins), had lost a good deal of blood and was battered and bruised.  But I knew the importance of getting our memories together so we took pictures, locks of hair, and had them foot printed.  We held their bodies for hours as the coroner waited down the hall.

Since then, I've worked with many grieving parents, even taking a family photos of siblings and their dead brother or sister; the image that was always planned but never happened.

Portraits are important and if one does not have a good picture of the loved one, animal or human, that has died, that's where I come in.  Please go to Memorial Art to read further.