The Making of 'Going Home'

This is a very personal piece and one of the first I was 'called' to create.

When my mother, father, and sister died within the same year, the grief was immense. I had words, but they weren’t enough. Then, unexpectedly, I had art.

I had never made digital collages before. I certainly didn't think of PowerPoint as an artistic tool. I was a writer whose primary experience with "art" was coloring postcards to soothe myself during the early days of the pandemic.

Yet something nudged me—no, called me—to begin layering fragments of images, pixels upon pixels, until something began to take shape within me and on the screen. It felt less like a choice and more like survival.

“Going Home” emerged from that place. A meditation. A balm. A way of witnessing grief without being consumed by it. Each fragment I placed was like holding one piece of sorrow long enough to then set it down. Each layer was both letting go and remembering.

As I built the image, I realized something essential: grief is overwhelming and often lonely, but it is also universal. We all go home eventually. To witness that truth through art was my way of reminding myself—and anyone who looks at it—–—that I am not alone, and neither are you. What we go home to is quite beautiful.

The process of trying to make sense of things through creating these collages continues to sustain me. Just this week, as the world felt like it might crack under the weight of chaos and division, the sadness began to mount inside me.

I felt restless, like I might jump out of my skin. Instead, I turned to the practice that had first saved me: I searched for images on Pixabay, and I began to let go. Moving them around felt like dragging paint across a canvas. With each version, unexpected discoveries appeared, and slowly the firestorms within quieted.

The world is still burning, but the danger of being consumed by it has eased. In my next post, I’ll share one of the pieces that emerged in that time: "Contemplating Freedom."

Where do you find your own sense of “home” in the midst of grief?