Freedom: A Thread Through Grief

bendwithaflower
Apr 27
4 min read

A personal reflection on art, loss, and the quiet strength of carrying love through the dark.

In recent years, I lost two people who shaped the communities around us— and whose absence has since shaped me.

Kaylea was a dear friend who passed with her children and beloved animal in a house fire. Dustin, the older brother of my best friend, someone I had grown up with, who felt like the closest thing to a big brother I had. He took his own life.

Their deaths arrived within the same year, bookending a season of deep unraveling. Along with the loss of a beloved auntie, and a death on my partners side of the family. Both sudden and shocking.

I found myself at the center of their grief echoes, supporting my closest friends—S as she mourned K, and then my bestie K as she grieved D.

I stepped in, as best I could, as someone who knew them all, loved them all, and wasn’t afraid to sit in the dark. And I changed.

Grief reworked me slowly and without permission.

It made me quieter. It made me braver. It taught me how to hold the weight of what cannot be fixed, and how to listen without needing to explain anything away. It made me a better friend, a better healer. And it woke me up to My Own Life.

Before this, I lived for others. Worked to please. Showed up to be liked. Shaped myself around what was needed. I remember my mothers mother calling me a shape shifter when I was very young. She died when I was six.

After all of this loss, (that wasn't even all of it that shook me within the last 5 years, I lost a great aunt who was really very special to me too back in 2020), I began to ask what my own joy looked like. What I wanted to feel, to live, to create: while I still could.

Some time later, my dear friend Chanelle Jefferson—a gifted artist and heart-led visionary—invited people into her offering, The Grief Project. I applied and she asked me to tell her my stories of D and K.

Not just about what happened, but what I remembered, what I felt, what I carried.

I spoke to her of K and D—not just of their deaths, but of their spirits. The things they loved. The way they touched people. The way grief lived in my body. The way it shaped how I breathe, how I listen, how I tend to others now. And from that, Chanelle painted.

The result was a piece called Freedom: a visual prayer woven from memory, love, and loss.

Artwork by: Chanelle Jefferson & Photography by: Janette Downie

The soft, earthy tones wash across the canvas like breath

quiet but alive

speaking to the compassion,

tenderness,

and deep-hearted courage of the ones we lost.

Shades of bolder blue and charcoal bloom like weather

reminders of their strength,

their storms, their longing to live despite the weight of pain.

These tones don’t just depict emotion; they hold it.

Through it all winds a single red thread, moving in gentle arcs, sometimes dipping out of view, sometimes held aloft. Suspended in the middle, it is bound between two outstretched hands—my hands—drawn open, reverent, offering, healing. One hand cradles the thread; the other touches the thick and long patch of grass that is always at the beachside where I first met Kaylea.

That thread is the role I have carried: The sacred call to hold, to steady, to shine when the world dims. My healing light lives in those hands - the unseen force that keeps the thread lifted, present, and whole.

Surrounding the thread, sacred symbols rise.

A blue and black butterfly perches delicately near one hand

K’s spirit, light, fluttering, always just beside the veil.

Cannabis leaves unfurl beneath

D’s essence, grounded, vivid, earthy.

And the pine, resting behind my hand—evoking the yoga classes I taught beneath tall trees where K once came to move and breathe, and carrying the comfort of D in scent and memory.

To me, pine is them both: Safe, honest, whole.

This painting will hang in my healing space once it is built, and until then, my home.

Not as a monument to grief—

but as a living memory of transformation.

Of what it means to hold others through the dark without losing the light.

Of what it means to survive with softness.

Of what it means to become the thread