"Death, Grief, and Faery: Letting Go" 30"x22" ink on paper

Part of a series surrounding my grief over my mother's death in 2020 (of cancer.)  In it, I address my processing of this loss by drawing her spirit, Fae creatures, and myself interacting in various ways.  

In this scenario I have imagined, those who die in a traumatic way have to work through that trauma in their next life, rather than being instantaneously blissful and at rest. I am interested in psychopomps, and I mean for this picture to be a sidhe (fairy, basically) woman carrying my mother’s spirit across the water to Tir Na Nog, the Celtic otherworld and land of the fae that is also associated with the land of the dead. In Tir Na Nog is endless feasting, dancing, revelry, and peace among the fairies and the departed. There is no sickness there, so her cancer would be healed, but there can be sorrow, and longing.

In this picture, she has reached more of a sense of acceptance, though she is still in emotional pain- and as she is carried across the waves, she lets her urn fall into the ocean, where merrows and selkies watch it plunge downward. In Irish folklore, Tir Na Nog is located across the western ocean. Given Ireland’s location, that ocean was the Atlantic. But art reflects life here, as my sister and I are planning to kayak into the Puget Sound, part of our own and our mother’s beloved western ocean, to spread her ashes in the water.