Note 2. The Great Wave.

When grief comes to visit you, words are often difficult to form. The brain fog from grief is real and it’s proven that grief has a strong negative effect on cognition.  So, when words were hard to find for me, I developed a strong affection for images.

The year of my 50th birthday, our daughter Ashli was working as an au pair in Paris and so my husband’s gift to me was a trip, our first trip abroad together.  One of the side trips we both wanted to take was to Monet’s House in Giverny.  I will say that anyone who visits Paris and doesn’t take time to visit the French countryside is not really getting the full experience of France.

My husband and I had both developed a love for impressionism, especially Monet, before we met so this was kind of an ultimate dream for us – traveling to the place where so much art was created and experiencing the gardens that inspires.   It was truly like stepping inside of a painting.

Monet’s house has so many unexpected surprises that take your breath away, but there was one surprise that stuck with us.  I’ve always wondered what kind of art an artist collects if he sells all of his own – well Monet collected Japanese woodblock prints.  Perfectly framed prints that were bursting with vivid color and peaceful scenes covered the walls of his yellow and blue dining room. The inspiration was so strong that we came home and painted our kitchen in the very same yellow and started collecting Japanese woodblock prints for our walls.

Our shared love of Japanese woodblock prints stayed with me in ways that I didn’t even comprehend until a few months after my husband passed away.  I had finally decided that I needed to start journaling so that I could process some of what I was feeling so I ventured out to a bookstore to find a pretty journal.  Of the probably 100 journals that were sitting on the shelf, two made themselves known to me.  The first literally fell off the shelf in front of me.  When I picked it up, the leather-bound journal had an image of a compass engraved on it and the first thought that popped into my head was, “man, do I need a compass right now because I’ve lost my true north.” As I placed the journal back on the shelf, the cover of the journal to its right was of The Great Wave off Kanagawa by the Japanese artist Hokusai. Of course, that information didn’t roll off the tip of my tongue while I was standing in the store, I just said to myself – oh that is exactly how I feel.

I walked out of the store that day with two journals and two images that would become my “go to” images even to this day. When words don’t come, images can help you speak your truth.

After that day in the bookstore, these two images kept speaking to me.  I found a compass buried in a drawer that my husband had given me.  I suddenly started recognizing The Great Wave images plastered on pillow covers, notecards, calendars . . . the list goes on and I participated in a fair amount of retail therapy in support of the image.

But the moment that this image spoke the most to me was on our anniversary – the second one that I’ve celebrated without my husband by my side.  It’s difficult to celebrate an anniversary when the person you’ve always celebrated with is no longer physical so I decided to create a remake of our first anniversary and took the train to Chicago to spend time at the Art Institute. 

Much to my surprise, as I walked up to the entrance of the Art Institute, I saw a banner with The Great Wavewaving in the cold Chicago wind. This beautiful little woodblock print has been locked in a vault at the Institute for years and it had recently been taken out of the vault and was on display for 25 more days before being locked away again.

Once I got into the art institute, I went directly to spend some time with what felt like an anniversary present from heaven and I spent the next hour just sitting in its presence. This image that has been such a large messenger of experience to me over the last year is a very small, simply famed piece that might have felt underwhelming if I hadn’t ascribed so much meaning to it. But there was so much more to be noticed for me.  The colors were deeper and more vibrant than I had seen in my reprints around the house and the details were so much stronger than I had developed an appreciation for.

Of course, I came home with a Christmas ornament to hang on the tree, but I also came home with a new feeling about this the piece. So far, I’ve survived and I’m still afloat just like the little longboat in the print and that’s a great feeling. My anniversary gift was the realization that moving forward in grief sometimes happens even when we don’t recognize it.

As I began writing this grief note, I noticed a post from my amazingly talented cousin, Meleah Gabhart, who is a wood sculpture artist.  She was recently commissioned to recreate The Great Wave and that is the image that I’m sharing with you on this grief note.

If you’d like to see more of her art, you can find her on Facebook at: Meleah Gabhart Art.

And if you are grieving, look around. Pay attention. Is there an image that speaks to you? Comfort and peace and new realizations can come in the beauty of art.