6 Months of Grief Project: Day 15

An Altar to Bear Cake

This is Day 15 of my #6MonthsOfGrief Project. To learn more about this practice, feel free to visit Day One, where I explain this project in more detail.

This is one of the altars I created for my husband. It started the day after he died and I have been building on it ever since. I found one of the shirts he wore to perform as his alter ego "Bear Cake," so I added it. I found his old cub scout sash with his merit badges carefully sewed onto it, so I added that. As the altar builds up, I know that I should clean things up a bit and do some re-organizaing, but I can't seem to bear to do it. I just keep adding and adding and adding to it, so that it is now a big jumble of joys and sorrows and images and objects. When I can, I get fresh flowers, to bring a little life back into the memories. I look at his picture, and see his soft eyes looking back into mine with so much love and I cry with the deep sorrow of missing him with all my being. When will this heartache ease? Will I ever feel loved this deeply by someone again?

I am very aware that this project can bring up a lot around yours or other's grief and loss, I will always follow every post with some online grief support resources that have helped me. Please feel free to let me know of online support that you have found healing in your grief, as well:

Art with Grief:

• Photographer [Sarah Treanor] Takes Moving Self-Portraits to Cope with Her Fiance's Death by Jillian Wong

• Self-Portraits: Expressing Emotion Through Art on What's Your Grief?

• The Hard Romance of Grief by Mark Liebenow

• The poetry of John O’Donohue

Resources for Widows:

• Camp Widow

• Soaring Spirits International

Living with Grief Resources:

• Grief Bibliography on Grief Healing

• Teresa “TL” Bruce's What to Say When Someone Dies

• A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

• Megan Devine’s Refuge in Grief

• The Geography of Sorrow: Francis Weller on Navigating Our Loses, interviewed by Tim McKee in Sun Magazine

• How to Be a Friend in Deed by Bruce Feiler in the New York Times

• 12 Things to Know About the First Year of Grieving Someone You Can’t Live Without by Laurie Costanza in Elephant Magazine

Thank you, and see you tomorrow.