Milestones & Grief Creep

"Sanctuary" © Sarah Treanor

This past week one of the most amazing things happened to me that has happened in my "after" life. I was selected as a finalist for a magazine cover of an art magazine - for one of my photographs that tells part of my grief journey - and ended up winning the final vote. It is the first time my art will be published on a magazine cover. This is huge for my fledgling career as an artist. And more-so it is huge because more people going through loss will see my grief series and hopefully find something of their own story there.

I couldn't believe how many people voted and shared. Thousands of fans and friends and family all rallied behind me to make this happen. My gym shared it on their business page. My mother-in-law's employees all voted and shared it. People I don't even know. Old college classmates. Old coworkers. So many left comments about the grief journey they are on, and how one particular image or another of mine spoke directly to them. People bought prints - one, a counselor, who will be putting up the photo in her grief counseling room. It has been unreal.

Suddenly I have found myself looking back in a different way than I have before. Looking back and realizing that I've gotten somewhere I do want to be. Before my fiancé died, none of this was here. I was working in a cubicle, feeling trapped and unhappy and scared because I had no clue how to ever really go for my dream of being an artist. Leaving a full time job was the MOST terrifying thing I could possibly imagine. Before he died, this idea of being an artist was all just wishful thinking… a far away notion that he and I would often talk about over afternoon lunches and morning coffee.

Little did I know that his death was going to take me on a journey I could have never imagined for myself. Not an EASY journey… but somehow, a far more meaningful one. His death was the catalyst in my leaving that career behind. It was the thing that shook me awake and made me see that if he could die for his dreams, then I'd better get started living for mine.

It's been a horrible and agonizing and fear-filled journey that I wouldn't wish on anyone (you all know this!), and it STILL is every step of the way. Somehow though, during these two and a half years I have found some sort of really meaningful beginning. One that is far more meaningful to me than the life I was living before he died.

It isn't the one I wanted - not like THIS. I never wanted to make art about the death of the most important person in my world. Or death in general. But when you lose your mother at age 9, your father at age 26 and then your fiancé at age 29… it begins to feel like someone is trying to tell you something. I finally decided to listen and allow death into my art… nothing has felt more healing.

I'm learning that by having his death and him as the center of what I'm putting myself into, it is giving it a solid foundation. On the days when I feel scared shitless and still have NO CLUE how I will ever make any REAL money doing this (living off my savings, betting it all on this crazy dream right now). On days when I feel lost and like I'm floating… knowing that he is at the center of this work is what helps me to be able to keep faith going. It helps me to know with all my heart that this work is valuable and meaningful, because all of my love for him rests within these images. And I know without a doubt that will mean something to other people. Clearly, it is.

The days after the big win have been of course an emotional roller coaster - just like any major event in our lives without our person. I call it grief creep… we all know it well. The aftermath of anything exciting - the quiet moments when the pain slips back in to steal the spotlight. As the week has progressed, I think I've just gotten sadder. Sad that he is not here to celebrate with me. Heartbroken that no one actually thought to take me out for a celebratory dinner or drink for this monumental moment in my life. No one. Which leaves me with the painful reminder that the person who was sharing a life WITH me is not here… and that I no longer have someone to be excited for me in the way that only your partner can be. And I miss that so much. And I miss him.

And suddenly, the whole milestone event of the magazine cover begins to pale in comparison to the feelings of sadness and grief. Don't you hate that? When the grief just seems to swallow up the good stuff - no matter how hard you try to not let it? I know I do. I've been fighting it all week - trying so hard to hold on to the good, and trying not to let in the sadness. I know… I have to let the sadness in. It needs to be felt as much as the joy. I will let it in, but dammit, I don't want to.

PS. A big thank you to anyone here who may have happened to vote for my image. You made a huge difference in my world this week.

To view my grief series "Still, Life" you can visit my blog here.

Death: The Barrier

I thought this week I would share one of the images from my self portrait series and the story behind it. While I was out shooting on the beach for last week’s photograph – wandering the grassy, windswept dunes – I came across a peculiar sight. Every plant on the beach was bright green and vibrant with life that day. Rich olive green sea grasses and succulent fat-leaved emerald vines with ripe yellow flowers. There must have been an unseasonable amount of rain recently because everything was really blushing. You could feel it – like all of nature had just taken in a deep breath.

But then, right in the middle of it all, I noticed this one particular type of plant. They were large – towering over me by at least a few feet. And every single one of them, as far as my eyes could see, over each rolling dune down the beach, was dead. All of them. There was such an eerie metaphoric nature to it… these clusters of death pitted right down in the midst of so much life. It seemed almost deliberate. Certainly hard to miss when you are closely observing a landscape as I often am.

With mosquitos biting boldly at my ankles and arms, (I will remember to add insect repellant to my camera bag from now on!) I grabbed my gear and climbed into a thicket of these otherworldly dead plants to explore. The leaves were a silvery blue-green hue – like faded sage. I had no plan. No idea what I even wanted to capture. I just began shooting, trying different ways of interacting with this mesmerizing space.

It is images like this one that make me realize how important it is sometimes to let go of our plan and follow wherever our feelings and intuition guide us. To not be so alarmed if we do not have a plan, and to trust that one will unfold for us.

Out of all the variations I shot for this image, this is the one that spoke to me instantly. It is because of the personal meaning which began to come out of it for me as I sat with it in the days after shooting. Mostly, it is in the eyes. There is a very specific kind of darkness there – a hollow vacancy which takes me right back to the year of my fiance’s death.

It was June when he died. 2012. I recall by the time autumn arrived, there was so little energy left in me. After endless minutes and hours and days and weeks and months of fighting and cryin – of screaming desperate animal sounds into the air – there came a time when there was nothing left in me but to just sit and stare blankly. And so I did, many days, just sit outside on the back porch at the ranch and stare off into space. Broken. Hollow-eyed. Feeling the cavernous wind against my skin – which only seemed to endlessly whisper of how far away spring was. Or that spring, for “us”, was never coming back again.

I don’t know if others saw this expression externally in those early days or not, but I do know that this is what it felt like on the inside. Every moment of every day for a long time. Vacant. Lost. Staring into nothing. Searching. Without words.

And then death – the quiet, dangerous barrier that divided me from everything. From him. From my future. From my past. From myself. From everyone else. On the other side of his death, I couldn’t see any other part of me or life that once existed. I could not see the woman who loved to rock climb and kayak, or the woman who dreamed of being an artist someday. Or the woman who loved animals and old western movies. I couldn’t see anything but the woman who just lost everything.

When people looked at me from the other side of that barrier – it felt like all they could see about me was death too. As if I was nothing more than the remains of his death and a reminder to them of things they didn’t want to know intimately. With the exception of a few individuals, it felt like no one could see me.

Two and a half years later, the spring is beginning to come for me. Life is starting to be vibrant again. I am able to see the other parts of myself again, as are others, it feels. I am starting to actually love life again – which astounds me to even say. There is still a part of me standing in the thicket of his death though. I think there will always be. And I think there should always be a part of me that stands there. To me, it is the place that always serves to remind me of how glorious the rest of the landscape is that surrounds me in this “after” life. Because when I stop and look around, it really is still so glorious. 

Spirit

"Spirit" © Sarah Treanor 2014 

Living with the loss of partner, or any great loss, is one of the most challenging things we will ever face in life. It sends us on a journey through the fire – into a darkness the likes of which we have never experienced before. It brings us to our knees and breaks us. Severely. I certainly remember this feeling well. Before my fiancé died, I knew I could handle anything that life threw at me. Only I didn’t really know that at all…

On the day he died, and the dark days thereafter, I came to find out what it really means to be able to handle anything life throws at you. To lose a soul mate – particularly in a sudden way – takes you to a place more painful and terrifying than I ever knew could exist. It breaks you right down to your bones. I know… I don't have to explain that to any of you. You have all, unfortunately, been there too.

I feared for my life – in a very real sense, for probably the whole first year. I feared for my life because I feared the death of my spirit. I was so badly broken that I honestly did not know if my spirit could ever recover. I was afraid that I would become dark and lose my sense of childlike wonder and hopefulness about the world. That this brokenness would overtake me and I would not be able to come out of the fire with my eyes ablaze anymore.

YET… I can still recall in the midst of it all – in those first hours and days and weeks – something inside me WAS ablaze. Something inside me was saying that this world can throw anything it wants to in my face and I will not stop believing that this life is beautiful. Or in the words of Mr. Tom Petty… “You can stand me up at the gates of hell, and I won’t back down”. (one of my go-songs right after he died, and still today).

I didn’t really know it at the time, but am quite certain now… that this was my spirit. This is the kind of stuff that amazes me about the human spirit. How broken we can be and yet still somehow, inexplicably, that soul part of us stands up for our broken human self. It doesn’t mean we feel any less broken. Or powerless. Or scared. But what I do know is that listening to my spirit was – and still is – something that gave me the ounce of strength I needed each day to get up and keep on trying to figure out what to do with all of this.

Looking back over things two years later is incredible at times. Because it feels like no time has passed at all – and often I still feel like I’m back at square one with my grief. But other days, like today, something lends me some perspective. And on days like this I can actually begin to feel like, yeah, I’ve crawled out of the fire… out of the worst of the darkness. This week's image from my "Still, Life" self portrait series is about just that. I’ve been battered and bruised and burned and scarred by this long journey, and I will be battered and bruised and burned and scarred much more before my time here is done… but I have not been broken. My eyes are still curious, my heart is still hopeful, and my spirit still burns bright… perhaps, even brighter than before. 

"Still, Life" is a weekly self portrait/written series I am doing for the entire year of 2014 - all about my journey of living with loss. To see more of this project you can check out my blog at 12moc.com. 

Battle On

©Sarah Treanor

I have to thank everyone for all the incredible responses to my post last week. You warmed my heart and really helped me to feel a bit more okay with all of this mess - and a bit less alone. Trying to welcome a new life is SO not easy, but its a heck of a lot easier with friends like all of you. You encourage me to be honest with where I am at on this journey, thank you for that. I thought today that I would share one of the self portraits from my photographic series I have been working on this year - and the story behind it - as it has become a big part of my own healing as of late. Both creating these images and writing about them has helped me to see myself and my pain in new ways… so I hope maybe this one will do that for someone else out there too….

"I just want to crawl out of my own skin" is something I said often in the first weeks and months after he died. For the whole first year really. Every cell of my body - every hair, every pore, every organ, was reverberating a constant and loud message of denial. Every cell of me, bumping up against the truth at every turn, abrasively, painfully. And then violently pushing and pushing, trying to thrust the truth out of my world. No, no, no, no, no, NO, NO, NO NO, NO!!!… vibrating loudly within every inch of me, trying to fight off a reality too painful, too unbelievable to comprehend. This single aspect of his death has been by far the most agonizing of all. 

I have wanted to create this image for almost a year now. Sometimes the visuals come to my mind really naturally, but I find I need to sit with them for a while though, until I feel the time. After a session with my grief coach this week, I instantly knew it was time.

I was describing to him my experience of joining the gym - how working out each day and watching my body change and become stronger has so deeply empowered me on so many other levels. And I said to him… "I feel more comfortable in my own skin than I ever have in my life". He had to repeat it to me in fact, just to make certain I grasped the sheer magnitude of that statement. And he was right… wow. Because just two years ago, I wanted to crawl out of my skin. And now, lately, I have begun to feel more comfortable in it than ever. Even though this whole journey is still confusing as hell and totally scary, I am beginning to feel this solidness in me that I've never had before. That is when I knew it was time to capture this image. To speak about both ends of this… of wanting to escape my own body for how much pain I was (and often still am) in, and for being able to sit within it, strong and solid.

There's something else I feel I need to share here too, because this image spoke further back into my past than just the past few years. I was in an abusive relationship through my early twenties, several years before meeting my fiancé. It was another extremely dark time in my life, and a very lonely one. What I did not expect to find in this image, was part of that story, too. Not only the fear and pain of that past, but also the inner strength that came out of it. Because when I look at the woman in this image… she has not only been through the unbelievable pain of losing the love of her life. She had - at a much earlier time of her life - been pushed and intimidated and made to feel small and forgotten and scared and alone. She had been locked out of her house on cold nights and left with bruises on her arms she had to hide. She had been made to feel worthless and shameful and flawed at her very core.

The woman in this image has been through all of that. And she has fought with every inch of her life for nearly a decade to heal all of these different pains. She has fought to become strong so that she could guard herself well enough to remain soft. Now, almost ten years later, she has become a woman who is not messed with. She's never pushed nor intimidated. She does not tolerate anyone who makes her or others feel small. You have to earn the right to be in her life by proving you have true integrity. She knows her worth, she is not ashamed of who she is or where she comes from, and she knows she is beauty at her very core. She knows how brightly she can shine, and how brightly others can too.

We all have our own story with pain. We all have the battles that we have fought, and are fighting through right now. The pains that break down our doors and leave us battered and bruised. The pain that makes our very foundation of a future crumble and vanish beneath our feet. Even if it cannot be seen on the skin… all of it still lies within me, and within you. I hope that in your pain you remember to stand up when it knocks you down. That you square your shoulders and look it right in the eye. That you are mindful of what you can gain from it - strength, wisdom, and a radiant inner beauty that surpassed anything you ever imagined yourself to be. Much love, battle on!

To see more of the photos and stories from this project, you can visit my blog at 12moc.com. 

A Beginning in the End

A lot of us talk about various times during this horrible journey where a shift begins to happen. It's nothing concrete or tangible, it may not even be something we can easily define… all we know is that something has changed in us and the way we view what has happened to us. That is the shift.

Since the new year began, I've been feeling as though something within me is on the move… some part of me is pushing outward and trying to pull me with it. Somewhere in the middle of this, I happened to write this post about sharing our stories through images. In that post, I shared a few very personal portraits of me. I'll be honest, I felt seriously freaked out to share that. Even though I take hundreds of photos a week, always I am behind the lens. It is somehow entirely more vulnerable for me to step in front of it. Far more vulnerable than sharing paragraphs of honest, raw words even are. So this all makes me quite nervy. But something shifted after I posted those pictures. A part of me woke up it felt like, or realized it wanted to do more of that. I owe that in large part to the profound support from everyone here who read and commented on that post.

It's been a little over a month since that post, and I am now in my 5th week of a year-long self portrait series. It already feels like I've been working on it for months. I have become so completely consumed by it - body, heart, mind, and soul. I cannot quite explain what is happening, I just know I am feeling pulled very strongly into it… and when that happens, I listen. I have an infinite number of visuals in my mind that have formed about what grief feels like - and what my journey of grief has been thus far. In these early weeks of this project I realized that I am stepping into something very deep and profound for my own healing by beginning to create these mental images literally and visually.

After writing hundreds of thousands of words over the past year and a half, writing really began to lose its healing effect for me in the past 3-4 months. It's as if my very soul was saying it is time to tell my story another way. So I've been struggling with this for a while now, continuing to try and write, and struggling more and more with it. Continuing to be on the lookout for what will feel more right. As soon as I began shooting these images a few weeks ago, it clicked. I knew instantly that I had found my new direction. I have to laugh a little because really it was right in front of my nose all along… literally. The very camera that my fiancé bought me for my 27th birthday, which started my journey with photography five years ago, which I still use to take all of my photos. The camera that gave me some of my first breaths of calm and peace and stillness after he died. Its been here all along. And while I've put my soul into all of my photos since he died, never had I thought to put my body into them until now. And I know, in the way that I know the grass is green, that this is where I am supposed to be for the next part of healing myself.

I won't stop writing entirely of course - I still have things I want to share through words, but they will be taking a back seat and serving as a support to my photos. On my creative blog, where I am posting each weekly image, I will also be sharing some of my journaling and other thoughts that pertain to the themes of each image.

This is an excerpt from the full post for the image above:

“I often imagine what it would be like if I stumbled on a sacred doorway to the other side and cautiously walked through the threshold… what would it be like? It would be a still, sacred place with an air of mystery around it. A space deeply connected to nature, so much so that even the trees have bowed in unison with its purpose. I wonder what it would look like as I stepped through to the other side? Would it look just like woods here, only filled with those I love who have passed on? Would I see him standing there, through the trees, and would we sit down together on a fallen log and share all the adventures we have both had since we last saw each other?

Or would it look like something entirely different – would I have no arms or legs at all? Would we be but two ambient forces flowing in a vast, open plain? Would there be no words, or any need for words? In this version, our spirits infuse more and more closely until we eventually become as one – the very original of how we began. Both of these visions give me hope. They help me see how beautiful it will be to share of my life on earth when I return to the ones I love on the other side.

How do you imagine a gateway like this to be? Is it somewhere specific, does it look or feel a certain way to you? What do you imagine it to be like on the other side if you stepped through that portal? How does make you feel to imagine sharing with those who have passed on about your life here on earth since you last saw each other? What sort of stories will you have to share?

Personally, I think its so valuable to form our own individual stories of these aspects of death. Sure, its all just imagination - but folks, imagination is a powerful tool for coping with reality. It helps me to keep my sights on what’s important… allows me focus on the kind of stories I want to create in my life.

Asking these questions serves as a reminder that our journey with those who have died is not over. We are merely on a long trip apart. Our job while still on earth is to live a life so rich and full that we arrive back home overflowing with grand stories of adventure and bravery and love… especially love. Stories that we will sit down and tell to our loved ones – or that they will infuse into their own being – and their souls will shine to see how boldly we have met life… to see that no matter how much pain we endured, we never let it stand in the way of our greatness.

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To Read more and follow the project weekly, visit my blog, 12 Months of Creativity. And again, thank you for being here, for reading, for encouraging me, and for being part of my journey forward. You have made such a difference in my life.

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