Grief through Art

My summer is chock full of workshops to get me professional development hours so I can renew my teaching license next summer. Today was “Teaching Math through Art”. One of the projects the instructor had us do was to create a self-portrait using construction paper, scissors, glue, tissue paper, etc. The only catch was we had to use at least six polygons in the piece. This piece was based on Pablo Picasso’s abstract style. She gave us the freedom to do someone else if we wanted to, although I had already decided I would depict Victoria in the portrait.

My mind was on her and my sadness stirred because the instructor had been talking about and showing some art she did with her children at home. I imagined myself at home doing such a fun thing as that with my little one, only to be slapped in the face by the thought that I already had her and she’s gone!

I’m not very good at art, but I expressed my grief (and some math!) through my artistic creation.

 

Victoria was 15 in. long, so I measured a piece of paper for her length in my favorite color, purple, which was also the color of my dress at her funeral and of the Mother’s Day flowers we bought for me.

Victoria never opened her eyes, so one of the eyes on her face is closed. The eye that is looking directly at me has a star in the center because one of the things I will miss the most is seeing the sparkle in her eyes, the windows to her soul and sweet personality. Her lips stood out to me the most when I met her, so I made them a bright pink. Her hair was brown and she had a pretty good amount of it! I remember her arms and hands were faintly blue because her heart was so tired, pumping slowly.

The three polygons in the left corner represent the sun. Morning, noon, and night, she is always gone from me. The purple balloon represents the one I just released when I went to see her place. The rectangle represents her marker and the heart, our love for her. As I looked at it later though, I thought it looked like an envelope and reminded me of the letters Mike and I wrote to her just a few days after her birth and death that we read at her funeral, and tucked into her casket.

The circle at the top is a clock and the triangle is marking her time on this earth: 10 minutes. There is a bottle holding my tears. There are two tears to represent the two months that I have been weeping for her. The last object is a butterfly. The left wing is not fully developed. Sometime in March one of my students brought in a group of butterflies for our class to release. All of them flew away except one. One of the butterflies had an underdeveloped wing. My heart broke as I watched it struggle. I knew that it would not survive. For some reason that butterfly had not developed correctly. My heart broke because I knew the same thing was happening to the precious baby growing inside of me. I didn’t know what to say to my students, but I wanted to protect them from being upset, so I just told them, “Sometimes these things happen.”  Only one student stayed behind desperately trying to help the butterfly take flight.

I think the butterfly also represents her spirit, so delicate, fragile, and beautiful fluttering away to heaven.

I couldn’t keep her.

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