For a couple of months in the Fall of 2022, I was experiencing a low-level unease. There was sadness and anger. I labeled it as depression. Something was off, and I couldn’t get to the bottom of it.

I used all my tools from therapy and coaching to work it from multiple angles, but nothing budged. I was stuck. 

I noticed my meditations started going longer and longer. From 10 minutes up to thirty minutes, sometimes multiple times a day. My energy was flat. My dreams were bizarre and expansive. Something was happening.

My dreams started to guide me to action. I was having the realization that along with my son going off to college, part of his decade-long passed mother had also vanished from my now empty home. 

I had done grief already. I did years of grief work on the passing of Lisa and all the circumstances and impacts connected to losing a spouse. What I didn’t realize is that the grief would never really go away. While I’d drained the bucket of past grief, there was new grief from things that haven’t happened yet that were yet ungrieved. 

Three big events in my son’s life were nagging at me. These events had an energy of grief not fully felt. Grief about Lisa for not being there at these big events in his life because she was dead. These events where I hadn’t yet grieved her absence were high school graduation, the college acceptance process, and dropping him off for his first day of college. Her absence of presence was causing a blackness in me to grow.

So, I got up one morning while in Utah from a wild dream that didn’t end after I woke and put a plan into action. I gathered candles and fire and went for a walk to a creek. I built an altar of sticks and did a letting go ceremony to invite Lisa into each of the three events she missed out on. 

For the first and second candles, I lit, invited Lisa, and marked the moment. I felt the grief of her not being there. I meditated on it, and not long after I began the wind blew out each of these candles. 

The third candle was different. The wind didn’t blow it out. Instead, I went on a long vision. I was in and out of this vision until 2 AM the next morning. That long vision is documented in the paintings in this series. 

Click through each of the paintings below to read about each phase of the journey.