Art exhibit in Sandy centers experiences of grief

Grief isn’t the kind of theme or subject matter that an art exhibit would normally be organized around to draw visitors to marvel at expressions of on canvas or clay. In fact, its experience can be socially isolating, often only with the support of family members or close friends people suffering through it might hope to call upon.

But a new art exhibit that opens this Friday at AntFarm Café and Bakery in Sandy aims to remove the stigma of talking about grief and center the reality of living with it. Now in its second year, “Grief Made Visible” is organized by Laura Lirette, the director of bereavement services at Mt. Hood Hospice. It showcases dozens of works of art and writing created by participants who attended grief support groups offered by the hospice. Prompts given during those sessions helped participants process their feelings and thoughts through writing and visual art, including painting and making collages. Joining us to talk about the exhibit are Lirette and participating artist Dina Renée, who shares her journey navigating the loss of loved ones.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. We end today with grief. It’s a subject of a new art show that’s opening at the AntFarm Café and Bakery in Sandy, on Friday evening. It’s called “Grief Made Visible.” It features dozens of works of art and writing created by participants who attended grief support groups offered by Mt. Hood Hospice. Laura Lirette is the director of bereavement services at the Hospice. Dina Renée participated in some of those support groups and has work that is featured in the show. They both join me now. Thanks very much for coming in.

Laura Lirette: Glad to be here.

Dina Renée: Thank you.

Miller: Dina, first. Why did you seek out Mt. Hood Hospice?

Renée: I had a sudden death, the death of my pet, which was hard, and then I had a sudden death of the person I call the child of my heart, my nephew. And because I had a good experience in the nineties when my best friend died during the AIDS crisis, I knew that what I needed was grief group.

Miller: Meaning, that after your best friend died in the 1990s, you took part in a support group, and that helped you?

Renée: Yes. Cascade AIDS was prepared. They knew people were dying, they knew people were grieving. And I had a very good experience there.

Miller: You’ve called what you have been dealing with this time “disenfranchised grief.” It’s a term that I think many people may not be familiar with. What do you mean by it?

Renée: I think the simplest example is, for example, a lot of us have pets that are like family members. And when a pet dies, people think of it as an animal. And depending on how close they are to their pets, they will or won’t imagine that that’s a grief, that’s painful, that carries forward, any longer than to say “oh, I’m so sorry.” In my case, I lost my nephew, who was the child of my heart, like a son to me. And this fall, I lost my auntie, my mother’s sister who was mom to me in a way that I didn’t have a mom. And right before the pandemic, I lost my dad who was my birth dad, not the dad who raised me. In my family structure, and I think in society at large, if it’s not a son, it’s not a parent, it’s a pet, that’s not the same grief, and it doesn’t get the same space and consideration.

Miller: Where did you get that sense? Did people ever say that to you? Or is it more subtle, “I recognize that you’re dealing with loss, but it’s not the same”?

Renée: It can be a subtle change of subject, and they don’t bring it up again or say “how are you?” Or it can be obvious, no one in the family says anything to you, even though that’s your de facto kid. It’s your sister’s kid, but also been kind of yours. And your parent, oh technically you’re a niece. No one ever says “how are you?” They all talk about her kid, my cousin. That is the honored person in the position of grief. I know my place, it’s in the background.

Miller: Can you tell us something if you don’t mind about your kid, about your nephew?

Renée: Oh my goodness, my nephew. His name was Austin. And he and I had different but not dissimilar spiritual lives and ways of looking at the world. As he grew deep into adulthood, he was 33 when he died suddenly, he shared that with me. I was the person he’d come to from the time he was young to say “well, what about?” or “what do you think about?” or “what if I?” He didn’t have a place at home to ask questions. And I was always clear though, I bonded to him young, that I was really the teenage auntie, right? “When there are teenagers and you want to kill them, call me in.”

So I was the person he asked questions of, and so revealed the deeper parts of himself too. And he was a lovely, gentle soul, who had just fledged late in life. He had a lot of health issues, so he was late in life deciding to move into the world. And then he died. He just dropped dead.

Miller: Can you describe what the support group sessions were like for you this time around?

Renée: I almost didn’t go back. Laura is the one who taught me the phrase “disenfranchised grief.” I went knowing I’d be different. My nephew has died. And I went figuring most people would have lost a spouse, possibly their own child, a son or a daughter. And when I got there, I listened to people who were clearly grieving even though they had resources, family support and the like, and needed a place to speak grief. But I didn’t feel comfortable, and I didn’t feel like I wanted to share, being that much of a different kind of grief.

And this woman, a participant who’d come back for a second time, this is her second time joining a grief group at Mt. Hood Hospice, she locked eyes with me and she told me a little story. And said “The people here may be different from you, your grief may not be like theirs but they speak grief. And you don’t get that anywhere else in your world.” I knew what she was talking about.

Miller: What do you mean, to treat grief like it’s a language, like it’s a world?

Renée: Well, some of the other members chimed in, people who had been to a grief group before. Someone chimed in and said “yeah, when I talk about the anniversary, everyone here knows I mean the death anniversary. I’m not talking about our wedding anniversary. I can’t talk that way in the rest of the world, and that increases my loneliness.” And my best friend died because of an AIDS related dementia. There weren’t a lot of people I could talk to about it in the nineties. You had to be a specific kind of person or from a specific slice of life. I knew what she meant.

Miller: You’re here both to talk just about grief, but also because of this new show that’s going to be the second annual exhibit in Sandy. Laura Lirette, why include art and art therapy in a grief support group?

Lirette: So, in 2022, I was contacted about an art therapy student at Lewis & Clark that needed a practicum site, originally was placed at a different hospice but they couldn’t take on the student. And I said I could take her on. So we started doing art groups, serendipitously, in some ways. I had been running writing groups prior because that’s sort of my skill set. But that art addition was really lovely. And when she came back in January of 23, she said “The things people are creating are amazing. Is there any way we could do a show?” And I thought, why not? Let’s reach out to AntFarm, they display art every month, let’s see if we can get on the calendar. And they agreed last year. And it was so successful and powerful that when I found out I was having an art therapy student coming as an intern placement this year, as well as a counseling student, both of them are with me 22 hours a week each, that increased our capacity. And so we’ve been able to do a lot more art incorporation into our groups.

And the main benefit that we see from it is that it opens up this whole avenue of expression that verbal language maybe can’t express. It gives people a different way to express and find and grapple with the things that may be coming up in their grief, that is maybe elusive for words. Because we live in a grief illiterate society. We don’t talk about death and dying. We don’t talk about grief. We don’t have the vocabulary or the language oftentimes to even be able to start to talk about what that experience looks like, sounds like, feels like. And so inviting people to come and play with art materials sometimes helps them uncover and then find the language that helps them express whatever might be happening.

Miller: Dina, you gave a gigantic nod when Laura said that one of the big benefits of art therapy is kind of giving people in these groups access to a different way to think about or communicate or reckon with their grief. What were some of the prompts that were most helpful for you?

Renée: I did one in response to “what does grief look like for you? What does grief feel like for you?” It’s defining in visual terms the feeling of grief. And describing the feeling of grief, if you’re not talking to someone who’s also grieving or has grief, something as significant as what you’re feeling, is very difficult. And I’m laughing because my eyes immediately fell on this magazine with animals and wildlife pictures, beautiful full color. And I saw a tiger on the cover that was a tiny cub, delightful little cub, grinning, petting. And I saw terror. And I’m like “oh, I know that feeling.” Because grief, for me, ended up having a lot of grins and teeth and stingers. It’s a ladybug, but it might be coming to get you. Things that look happy, a baby doll, but it’s in the trash. Celebratory or kind or soft, but felt terrifying. And that’s what grief was feeling like to me. But I couldn’t say that. I just kept finding pictures, my brain would go “yeah, that,” and then I’ve got to cut them up. And because we have a finite period of time, and a task, “what does grief feel like to you,” I don’t have to find words. My brain did a little Tetris thing, packed it all together when I got done and went “Yeah!”

Miller: In other words, you actually could see your own grief, literally see it, and then also figuratively understand it differently after the fact. It wasn’t just a question of how to communicate to the outer world, but you could understand it better for yourself.

Renée: I learned to communicate it to me. I was able to define it to myself in that moment, with those visuals I locked eyes on, and then cut out and moved around until it became a different kaleidoscopic picture, like “That’s it.” It was an exploration and a discovery process on my part, in the moment.

Miller: Laura, it’s one thing to have this be a really profound experience for the participants in a group. It’s another to say “now we’re going to take the work that they created as part of this group, and make it public.” Why do that?

Lirette: So the way that I think of it is it’s really a grief advocacy action. Grief has a way of destabilizing us, of removing our sense of power or control. And as Dina was talking about, the art creation sort of gave her an avenue and insight into finding some control, some modicum of agency with the grief.

The next step then is an invitation to anyone in our groups, it’s not required, it’s just an invitation, if they’re comfortable sharing any of the things that they create, they’re welcome to share them in a public setting, in the hope of creating a public space that has infinite numbers of representations of grief. To show the diversity of the impacts, the scope of what grief can look like, might feel like for people. To stimulate conversations in the community over the course of the month between people who are noticing or witnessing or looking at or reading the descriptions or the writings that people have created. That might give a sense of connection to them, that might put their experience in the context of human experience, that maybe might say “you’re not alone in this” if someone is missing someone. Or it might help them learn how to be better at supporting someone who is missing somebody or something.

Miller: What impacts did you notice last year at the first version of this show?

Lirette: One of my favorite things about last year’s show is I had information cards out for people to give us feedback. One of the comments was “need more Kleenex”, because the 80 packets of Kleenex I had set out was apparently insufficient for the crowd of 80 that came.

And what that told me is that people were experiencing full range of emotion. I saw people laughing, I saw people talking, I saw people giving each other hugs. And most of them didn’t know each other. They were just connecting through the art, through the writing that was on display. And knowing that everyone in that room was open to that full range of emotion that we experience. And grief is the collection of reactions and responses we have when something important is lost.

Miller: Dina, Laura mentioned that we live in a grief illiterate society here. What do you think a grief literate society would look like, or feel like?

Renée: I am imagining what I did after Jose died. Jose was my best friend who died in 1994. It’s the early nineties, he’s gay, he had AIDS. There’s so many places where I cannot say everything, where people just give me a blank look, like “he was like a brother to you?”

What I experienced when I did the writing, I joined a writing group and just wrote everything out and created a book. And what I experienced as I worked in workshops with that book is more versions of that question. They kept giving me things that were begging me to define for them in terms they could understand “so he was more like a husband to you?” “No, he was my best friend that looked like this.” I kept running into how people and there were a lot of different points, gay, immigrant from Nicaragua AIDS, early death, not a husband, not a brother, not a son, where people could not translate my loss to their lives because it wasn’t a port they had to plug into.

Miller: It strikes me that we’re not just talking about grief illiteracy here, but love illiteracy, a broader understanding of what human connection is, and then what happens when you lose that connection.

I wish we had more time to talk, we don’t. But thank you very much Laura Lirette and Dina Renée.

Renée / Lirette: Thank you for having us.

Miller: Dina Renée is a participating artist in the “Grief Made Visible” exhibit. It opens this coming Friday. There is an opening reception from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. It goes through the end of this month at the AntFarm in Sandy.

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