Meet Jennifer
Artist & AuthorThe Day My World Broke Open – Journaling and Writing
From the day of his diagnosis, I began my life-long journey of learning about death and dying. Somehow, I believed that understanding death, dying, and grief would give me the strength to live without him. In my thirties, I volunteered at a local hospice. My first home assignment was working with an older woman named Mary, who was dying of cancer. She lived with her daughter and her grandchildren. My favorite memory was when Mary’s nine-year-old granddaughter told me, “I don’t know how my mommy did everything before she got you.” We folded laundry together that day, and she made me my first-ever peanut butter and banana sandwich. It was delicious.
Why did he have to die?
After Kelly died, I recall asking God, “Why did he have to die?” The voice inside my head said, “So you can do your work.”
I attended a weekly support group for bereaved parents, Forever Loved, at Trinity Baptist Church. There, I found comfort in the stories of other parents who had lost a child. After about a year, the chaplain counselor asked if I would consider facilitating the support group. I said yes. I facilitated Forever Loved for approximately a year and a half. It was one of the most transformative and beautiful experiences of my life.
I thought of helping bereaved parents by writing a book at that time. I had journaled since Kelly’s death. It was my way of getting the pain out of my heart and onto paper. I scribbled onto yellow ruled pads and cried. Some of my essays have appeared in Grief Digest and Bereavement magazines.
My Goddaughter, Joysa, is a journalist, a rabbi, and an avid reader. In support of my grief, she mailed me beautiful writings on the loss of a child. I also was reading voraciously about the loss of a child.
My book, Star Child: A Mother’s Journey through Grief, was born. I included stories and poems that complemented my journal writing. I chose each story and poem because of its beauty, eloquence, grace, and power. Their words and sentiments echoed a familiar song to my broken heart. Different stories, different words, different, but, in the end, the same. In the words of Queen Elizabeth II, “Grief is the price we pay for love.”
An Excerpt from Star Child
In the Forever Loved support group, Nancy was one of the parents who always shared openly, grieved deeply, and cried a lot. Both initially and every time she shared her story, the immensity of her sorrow always touched me deeply.
Tonight, at the Forever Loved meeting, Nancy was crying. It was five years since her four-and-a-half-year-old son, Heath, had been hit by a car and killed.
But tonight, Nancy was crying about something else. Something simple. She was crying about a single blue sock. Heath’s sock-the one she found behind her dryer when she moved it out from the wall. That’s all, just a single blue sock that belonged to a little boy named Heath.
Where it all started
Collage Journey
In 2008, I began a journey with collage art. I facilitated collage workshops at Viva Books, RX Art Workshop (Bihl Haus Arts) – The Labyrinth of Grief: Transforming Your Grief through Creative Expression, The South Texas Children’s Bereavement Center, Mind Science Foundation, Chromosome 18 annual convention (The Heart’s Perspective), and Bereaved Parents U.S.A. annual convention.
Collage is an intuitive, reflective, and absorbing process beginning with selecting the images and words that speak to you (you won’t be sure why) from the colorful piles of torn magazine pages. The images choose you; you don’t choose them. The experience is deliberate and contemplative while circumventing your brain. The imaginative process continues with the soft sounds of tearing or cutting paper and positioning and arranging the images, offering unexpected insights (maybe an epiphany) about your personal story.
Finding Angels
Photography
I have always been in love with angels. Like many thousands worldwide, I have a heart/soul connection with them. One day, my husband and I visited Kelly’s grave to honor his birthday. I brushed dried grass from his headstone and placed flowers in the copper vase. As we left the cemetery, I saw the most beautiful angel statue. I asked my husband to stop. I exited the car and photographed my first Angel with my cell phone.
The exquisitely carved Angel stood six feet tall or taller, her head bowed, her hands folded upward, one over the other, just below her waist. A few dried brown leaves lay in the cup of her hands. The headstone’s inscription revealed the young man was named “Danny” and he had died at the age of 21.
At the bottom of the headstone, the message, “Danny, you will always bring us joy.” I returned the following week and photographed “Danny’s Angel” with my professional camera. Dannny’s Angel is one of my favorite angels because her presence found me and set me on this beautiful journey of finding beauty.
I find the gift through the lens of my camera. My ever-present intention is to seek beauty to share with others.
The Conundrum of Grief
(excerpted from Star Child)
Brenda Rabalais, PhD, LMFT, is the president of Lee’s Place, a non-profit grief and loss counseling center she founded in Florida in 2000 in memory of her son, Lee Rabalais, who died of bone cancer at the age of fourteen.
“I’m always amazed at how contradictory I feel when I read other people’s stories of experiences of loss. On the one hand, I’m impressed at how eloquent the writings can be-descriptive, shocking, similar to or different from my own experiences with death, tender, terrible, or transformative.Â
Grief is something that cannot find full expression in this world. So, what do we do with it? We do what humans can do: we write, we paint, we sing, we dance. All in the hopes of somehow expressing on the outside what we know on the inside. And the wheel turns.”