the Inspiration of loss
Dedicated to Kristi Marie Higday [December 16, 1969 ~ May 19, 2013]
Inspiration is an interesting thing.
It comes, it goes, it can originate in the most unexpected places.
I have no doubt that I was inspired and creative as a child, but don’t recall any landmark moments. Undergraduate school is really where it started. I found self-portraiture, photography and the ability to take the most emotional moment and turn it into a visual representation. It was an empowering feeling and it gave me the ability to translate pain, happiness, anger and rejection into a visual punch to the gut.
Art was able to do what words seemed incapable of.
In graduate school, I learned something else. Being a professional artist, in some sense, was about who you knew, how you were promoted, where you might go in your career. It became less about the emotion or the concept and more about other factors. By the time I left school, there was very little creativity or inspiration left.
I was disenchanted by the concept of art and what it might be.
Flash forward to 2012. My sister, Kristi, was diagnosed with cancer. The person who was closest to me in the world was sick.
I spent the next year in Boston hearing stories but refusing to believe. The treatments, the toll that sickness can take on a life, the fear of my parents, the pain of her children, the tears of her. I saw her two final times before the end.
The first was a last ditch effort to receive treatment at a hospital near my home. I met my sister and her husband at the airport. I saw her and I knew. The problem is that knowing and believing are still two different things. Her face was pierced with pain, her skin the color of sadness, her laugh gone. This, for two sisters who thrived on laughter.
During her trip to Boston, I saw and heard things I will never talk about. I have a few photos I shot while she slept that I will never share. I have a Disney movie I will never see again since we watched it during this time together.
The second time I saw her originated in a phone call from Oregon. The call that I must go home. It was time to believe.
Days of pain. The fluttering of her blue eyes.
There are no words to describe to people this type of loss. To be honest, most people don’t want to hear about it, so you stay very quiet. For almost a year, all laughter was gone. Life was void of happiness. There was the person I was before and the person I was after.
I watched life like an observer.
Flash forward to 2014. As I tried to continue living life, I kept seeing moments I wanted to share with my sister. Sun through the trees, steam from a coffee cup, maple leaves on a sidewalk, an illustration in a book. I started to photograph at least one of these moments each day to share with her. In some ways, reconnecting my life to the memory of her. The memory of me.
And with this, something unexpected happen. I started to create again. I started to find beauty in life, appreciation in the little things, a place for myself to visit and be semi-whole. A place that was where the old me lived and could possibly exist again.
I was inspired.
As I continued on this creative journey, I found my voice. My love for text, design, art, collage, the handmade, my love for her, all came to the forefront. I found peace in sitting for hours in my house taking apart printed matter and putting it back together again. The ability to reinterpret and reimagine what was already there. The ability to reimagine me.
I would give anything to have my sister back. To hear her laugh, to see her face, her blue eyes. But, I am thankful to her. To what this loss has given me. I am still different, I am still changed. But this hard and painful path has guided me to inspiration, given me the ability to communicate, steered me down the path to the me that I thought I had lost.
For this, I am grateful.