Geometry of Grief, and Getting Lost in Printmaking

“… to live at all, however long or short, is an unbidden bargain to lose everything you hold precious: every love and every life, including your own. Loss is the price of life — a price we never chose to pay any more than we chose to be born

… Each loss takes a piece of us — a piece soft and alive — and leaves in its place something cold and heavy; each subsequent loss becomes the magnet that draws out those old leaden pieces, pulls them out from the reliquary of scar tissue where we have been keeping them in order to live, makes them rip through our being afresh. And yet the shrapnel pieces that surface are smaller and softer-edged than when they first entered through the open wound of raw bereavement, smoothed and contracted by the ongoingness of life

… the way to view and live through grief — an exercise in continual dilation of perspective, so that life can be seen from more and more angles besides the acuteness of loss, noticing more and more of what is there, what remains and what grows in the wake of the lost; an exercise in remembering, again and again, that healing is subtle and unpredictable, unfolding in tiny, quiet, immeasurable increments that eventually add up to profound changes of measurable difference.
Maria Popova, “The Geometry of Grief”, Marginalian, 20 Nov 2021

My met-at-university friend David who is a sociocultural anthropologist says: “After a death, you fall out of ordinary spacetime. I think it’s partly a kind of self-protection against the ordinary world and its time frame which can’t accommodate what you are having to process.”

I’ve had not quite four weeks of days that feel as long as Christmas eve, but without the reason to wish tomorrow would hurry up and arrive already. Glacial time for the edges of the Alistair-shaped hole to be less precarious.

After a failed attempt on Saturday, yesterday I motivated myself sufficiently to play with a set of coloured printmaking inks I bought a few months ago. Colours that Alistair and I oohed and aahed over; discussed how different they were to my usual colours and what might develop.

My first attempt was a sequence of errors which led to the ink smearing in the press as it was too tight, and the paper creasing. But I tried again because it was more appealing than cleaning up, and again. I am pleased with this result: