A Drawing Born from Loss
In July 2018, I returned from my grandmother’s funeral carrying a weight I could not name. The village burial was over. Family had dispersed. I came home with grief, and guilt for not weeping enough, for drifting away from religion, for leaving too soon. The silence in the presence of these feelings was louder than any prayer.
I opened my journal. No plan. No audience. On one page, I began to draw the Virgin Mary from my family's Green Orthodox Tradition. On the page, I started to write a verse I had heard my grandmother preach over and over. The pen became my way of mourning, and the paper became the grave I can visit.
This act was a way to give myself the care my mind needed that I could not or did not know how to ask for in words.
Art as a Safe Haven
I learned to draw in secrecy. In Syria, I copied saints from church walls, borrowed book illustrations, and invented characters to hold feelings I could not name. My sketchbooks hid under my bed, filled with scribbles during power cuts, often destroyed before they could be found.
By 2018, this private ritual had become an instinct. After the funeral, I blackened a journal page until it felt heavy in my hands. In the middle the darkness, scripture appeared "Love one another. As I have loved you" (John 13:34) The darkest color I could find became an emotional tomb with the words emerging from it.
The page held the chaos that was simmering in my system. Layering, text, repeating gestures, these gave me back a sense in the middest of grief.
The Virgin Mary Reimagined: A Maternal Legacy
The Virgin Mary I drew was not in sorrow like Michelangelo's Pietà or holding her son close to her body. She was like in the byzantine icongraphic tradition of Platytera, standing fierce in devotion, unshaken in her gaze, steady in her presence. She glowed with gold rays, reminding me of my grandmother, a spiritual mother who commanded through love rather than force. In drawing The Cirgin Mary, I was reassembling my grandmother’s strength into a form I could keep.
If you have lost someone, try this: recall what reminds you of their truest self. Translate that memory into colors. Let the page carry their strength so it remains accessible when you need it.
For more on using art to navigate loss, see my video on art therapy for grief on my Youtube channel.
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A Visiting Graphic Novel: Wisdom from my grandmother
From the seed of that 2018 drawing grew A Visiting, a 50-100 page graphic novel idea shaped by my grandmother’s voice. It gathers her quiet lessons on love, acceptance, progress, and the futility of perfection. These pages reimagine her as a guide who meets fear and self-doubt with patience, answering in ways I wish everyone heard.
You can support the making of this graphic novel soon on Kickstarter and/or join my Patreon for early access and behind-the-scenes work.
If you want to explore how art can reparent us, email me to join my workshop, where we will use drawing to create inner figures of safety and care.
Stay tuned for updates on the launch of A Visiting and new ways to work with your own inner voices through art.