The Artists’
Grief Deck

Let it rain....

Bring your attention to your hands and simply touch the things around you. Be mindful of how these things feel, of how you experience their textures and vibrations through your fingertips. Touch your...

If you have clay or playdough allow your hands to squish, mold, or shape it. Using a toothpick or pencil, write your loved one’s name in the clay/dough. Spend a minute remembering a way they worked...

Grief is a four-dimensional possession. It fills some part of this room, and it also reaches back in time and toward the future. First study how 3D objects are enclosed: how 2D cloth or paper can be l...

The outside must seem so scary, eh? I ask you to spare a minute or two to just stop whatever you are doing. Take this time for yourself. You are the culmination of your ancestors and their lived exper...

Although we are living in a sad moment, imagination helps me to endure the pandemic and isolation. Being at home, I imagined places, cities, beaches, river banks, isles, little towns in the mountains,...

I didn’t know I thought about my mom everyday until I had to wake up and remind myself that she was dead. Now, I wake up and remind myself she lived. Gather on a tray: Pen, paper, candle, lighter, a...

We all grieve differently and we carry our grief differently. Let’s explore our grief and the places in our bodies where we hold and carry that grief. Start with a body scan - take a couple of deep...

Create and collaborate. Use an item belonging to your loved one to create something new. T-shirts may become a quilt or a pillow. Photos and letters may become a collage. You might listen to their fav...

Find something that you think your loved one would have loved and love it for them. It doesn’t have to be anything special or perfect. Maybe it is a simple object in your home, outside in nature, or...

Our world has been in disarray from COVID-19 since March. If you’re like me and have a paper calendar, the following months look strange, empty, and not even representative of our own lives. Spend t...

Losing someone or something important to us brings home the fact there is much in life we cannot control. Control is something we thought we had, but ultimately there are many things in life we cannot...

Helping others will help yourself.

Focusing on others can be a great way to enable healing.

Consider doing random acts of kindness: donating supplies to an animal shelter, delivering flowers to a nursing home...

Imagine a vase with flowers and those flowers are the person you are missing (if you have a vase and real flowers, this will work). Now imagine the smell of the flowers and picture the person. Does th...

"It takes 1,000 people for one person to grieve." Martín Prechtel Your village exists to witness this time. Your village existed from the moment you came here. Look around you. We will carry your gri...

Meditation: "In the future the dead is all of us - jumped out of the earth to dance again. Every step a reminder of rhythm. Woven into our clothes gleam - dragonfly winged - I remember the good ghosts...

Look at the sky.

Look at the sky out your window.

Look for all the variations of color and light you can see. Maybe there are clouds and they are moving...

I walked a mile with Pleasure; She chatted all the way; But left me none the wiser For all she had to say. I walked a mile with Sorrow; And ne’er a word said she; But, oh! The things I learned from...

Spell out the person or groups name vertically. Use each letter of the name and come up with a word that begins with that letter and describes you loved one(s). L ovely I ncomparable L ife of the part...