Even when her voice is silent, I hear her in the colours left behind.
It has been ten years since my mom passed, and still the memory sits with me as if it were yesterday. People will tell you that time heals all wounds, but I’ve learned that time doesn’t heal—it reshapes. Grief doesn’t vanish. It stains the canvas of your life, layering itself into the background, always there beneath the new colours you add.
When someone you love leaves this world, it can feel like the ground gives way beneath you. At first, you might feel nothing at all. Numbness paints everything in muted tones, leaving you to wonder if something inside you has broken. And then, without warning, it arrives—the wave that flattens you. The flood of grief pours through every part of you, unrelenting, unstoppable.
It leaves you empty and overflowing at the same time.
In those first months, I lived like a sketch without shading—present, but hollow. Still, my hands itched to create. Creativity has always been my way of breathing, and even in the numbness, I found myself reaching for brushes, for words, for colour. My grief found its way into every line, every stroke, every piece of work. Art gave me a way to move when my body felt paralysed, a way to shape the unshapable.
And in the months, years, even decades that follow, you learn that grief has no finish line. There is no final brushstroke, no moment when the painting is complete. It changes, it shifts, it finds new shapes—but it doesn’t go away. And so we keep layering it into the work of our lives. Sometimes it bleeds dark and heavy, other times it softens into light.
People mean well when they offer words—“It will get easier,” “Time will heal,” “They’re in a better place.” But if you’ve lived it, you know: words can’t reach that deep. That is why I turn to art. Creativity gives me a language for grief when spoken words fail. A canvas doesn’t tell me to move on. A blank page doesn’t flinch when I pour out what feels unbearable. Through art, the ache has somewhere to go, somewhere to live outside my body for a while.
Here is what I can tell you, from standing inside it: you are not broken. You are not weak for feeling hollow, detached, angry, or undone. Grief is not a failure to “move on”—it is the echo of love, carved into your very being. And if you create—whether through paint, poetry, clay, or song—let your art be the vessel that carries it.
Over time, you don’t “get over it.” What you do is learn to carry it. You learn to live alongside it, to build a life around the hole instead of trying to fill it. You adapt. You bend. And somehow, even in the darkest seasons, moments of beauty return.
One day, you notice a flower blooming that you hadn’t tended, or the way autumn leaves glow just before they fall. You realise that life is still painting itself forward, and you are part of that canvas. And in your own art—in every mark, every shape, every word—you find proof that even pain can create beauty, that even sorrow can be transformed into light.
Grief does not end. But neither does love. And in learning to hold them together—layered like brushstrokes, heavy and light—we discover a strange kind of strength. Not the strength of forgetting, but the strength of carrying, creating, and still blooming in the shadow of what we’ve lost.