The Grief Artist

I tear the hearts into pieces, dumping them into the blender strip by strip. Sometimes I peel the paper hearts apart around certain words, and other times I watch their shrinking geometry after each incautious rip. Then, I add water. Then, the loud whir of the blade turning the old love letters full of adorations and apologies into fresh pulp. 

The notes—written on pink hearts, in Sharpie—fell out of a picture book years ago. I’d purchased my son a story about a panda in striped shorts and a red parasol, and when I opened the glossy pages, out fell 40 construction paper hearts in different shades of pink. The smallest hold only their own color and classic shape. The next size up contains fragments and implied praise: your voice, your hair, your happiness. As the hearts grow bigger, the messages get more complex. The lover tells their beloved how much they adore them. The lover thanks the beloved for their care, and also for sharing their joy of Animal Crossing. The lover says they will always look forward to underwear, Netflix, and Bloody Marys. 

I enjoy the particulars of their relationship more than the general adorations, but I know when the hearts tumble into my lap that their discovery in a sold book means the love is over. The cherished voice whispers endearments to someone else now. The hair has someone else’s fingers in it. Or perhaps not. Perhaps the beloved now sloppily mixes tomato juice and vodka in a thermos and heads to the mountains to watch the sunrise alone. When old notes of someone else’s love littered my legs, I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away, so I tucked them away at the top of my son’s closet. This gift between lover and beloved was sold for a few dollars, the messages inside forgotten. Of course I did not think I had any right to these intimacies, but these strangers once loved with hope, and I wanted to steward this part of their story to some other ending.

Someone in my group for hospice workers shares the article on flowers as a grief ritual, and that’s how I discover Janet. I quickly read the news story about how Janet uses the dried flowers from her mother’s funeral to make new images for 100 days. Each day she uses the petals and stems to create and photograph a new form, and each day she takes it all apart, tucking the dried floral pieces back into storage. I start to follow her Instagram account, eager for the inevitable startle of old roses rendered into birds or flattened carnations transformed into the segments of a caterpillar rising off a branch. It’s common to see birds and insects as visitations from the dead. Every flying thing from monarch butterflies to Emily Dickinson’s buzzing fly has been associated with death, but I love that in