Weathering Grief Living After Loss
Article by: Heaven Sofia
Trigger warning: This article mentions death, grief, and suicide
I recently picked up a newer iteration of the Batman comics, and it dove into the topics of life after loss. Grief is universal but the process of navigating it is very personal.
In 2023, I was on the phone with my friend, Denver-based artist Jini Kim Veenker (@jini.kimchis.printing), when she received a call that devastated her. One of her closest friends had died tragically by suicide. The friend was an artist who painted butterflies across her city. I had taken a photo of one of her murals years before I even knew who she was. Her work created picture perfect moments and smiles for complete strangers, and through that she made the world more beautiful. And then suddenly, she was gone.
At the time, I was in my own grief. Before loss, I would have tried to fix things with words I wouldn’t have understood. I would have offered verbal support, paired with advice on being grounded and “talking to someone”. But grief changed me and all I could say was, “I’m so…so sorry.” Because I knew what was coming next.
Grief is an ocean. It has an undercurrent, tidal waves, and volcanic eruptions. It’s an intrusive presence that fills all the space inside you so full you have no choice but to expand around it or your ribs will crack. Sometimes it’s a hug that feels too tight. Even though it hurts, letting go early feels wrong. Like stepping out of a hot shower into cold air. There’s a strange comfort in staying inside. Is it a sanctuary or a hiding place?
She wasn’t on dry land anymore and probably wouldn’t be for a while. She was on a tiny raft in the middle of stormy seas. She woke up one person that day and went to bed someone entirely different.
Grief Causes Growth @jini.kimchis.printing
Grief imploded my life.
Jini met her grief with a different approach.
She created.
She has always loved moths, the gothic butterflies that fly chaotically toward light. Her friend obviously loved butterflies. After the loss, both began appearing in Jini’s work. It felt like she was trying to create a space where the sun and moon could have a play date. Where the living and the departed could interact on the same page.
She made a piece titled Protection Spell.
In it, a mouse nested in rosemary leaves sleeps surrounded by two snakes. One living making up half of a heart, and the skeleton of another making up the other half.
Protection Spell, @jini.kimchis.printing
The skeleton, left behind after death, but still present for the spell. Reborn to a new form. The fragile mouse sleeps, encircled by what could destroy it. If the mouse is us, maybe the snakes represent what we love. Love shifts and sheds and outlives its original form. It is protective, dangerous, and capable of consuming us, but it is still part of the circle.
In Who Has the Will, intertwining flowers and weeds grow together. Competing for resources and space, maybe, but both survive. I think maybe we are the weeds and we are the flowers. We have this competition inside us between the parts that need careful tending and the parts that fight to survive. Weeds are persistent and adaptive.
Who Has the Will @jini.kimchis.printing
They will crawl toward the sunlight they sense above the concrete and find a way through. Flowers seem more fragile and they get the praise, but they require more tending. Both need rain, both need light. Grief gives you both.
Jini is currently working on an untitled painting representing the bargaining stage of grief. We all know that death doesn’t bargain, but our conscious minds will deconstruct death to the point where logic begins to fall apart. The wake of that deconstruction leaves behind the compost. The compost grows into depression.
It’s scary, but it’s part of the process. It feeds what comes next. The only way to reach acceptance is through.
My sister, Ariana Taylor, is a funeral directing assistant. She shared her perspective.
“Working in funeral service has taught me that death is anything but an end. Being around death hasn’t numbed me to it. It’s made me more aware of what matters. At the end of life, people wish they had been more present, not that they had done more.
Grief doesn’t always need words. Sometimes quiet presence matters most. Dignity means honoring every person equally in death. They mattered to someone, so they matter to me.”
Untitled WIP, @jini.kimchis.printing
Art can be a death doula. Being present with art, admiring it, processing it.
In Batman Rebirth, Bruce Wayne admits he once considered ending his life after his parents were murdered. Instead, he chooses to live for them. He doesn’t do it without error, and he doesn’t seem to be taking a lot of advice from self-help books, but he finds his purpose and he lives. Life gets messy. Sometimes the motivation is complicated. But it is still living.
The memory of winter exists even after the ground thaws.
Compost feeds flowers.
Weeds grow through concrete.
Moths still chase light.
So if you take away nothing else from this: be present. Create something. Stay to see what grows from the compost. The tide turns.
I hope this helps.
<3 heaven sofia