On Mortality: Grief, Memory, and the Light We Leave Behind

A reflection on trauma, hope, legacy, and two paintings that ask us to witness what remains.

My paintings often begin with a question. Beneath that question is another, larger one: What does it mean to be human?

I do not believe that question can be answered alone. It asks something of the artist, but it also asks something of the viewer. Both must be willing to enter a vulnerable space—to look at grief without turning away, to recognize hope without denying darkness, and to understand mortality as part of our shared human journey.

Two works, What Makes for a Grievable Light? and The Fading Reverberation of Memories, approach that journey from different directions. One looks through the eyes of a child confronting darkness. The other enters the quiet that follows loss. Together, they ask us to consider what we carry, what fades, and what kind of light can survive.

What Makes for a Grievable Light?

In What Makes for a Grievable Light?, a young child stares intensely into the flame of a candle. The surrounding darkness immediately raises questions. Why is the child alone? What does the candle mean to him? Is the flame fragile, comforting, or both?

The painting grows from one of my earliest memories; an experience marked by abuse, isolation, and grief in my first failed adoption. I approach that memory with care. The purpose is not to turn trauma into spectacle or reduce a child to what happened to him. Instead, the work makes room for the child’s interior life. His attention to the flame becomes an act of witness, endurance, and possibility; and most certainly- hope.

As someone who has lived within the foster care system, worked as a social worker, and advocated for mental health, I understand how easily people can be defined by records, diagnoses, or the worst thing that happened to them. A trauma-informed perspective asks us to look again. It recognizes pain while refusing to erase agency. It asks not “What is wrong with you?” but rather “What happened to you and what helped you survive?”

The candle becomes what I call a “grievable light”: a symbol of hope, solace, memory, faith, and the human capacity to move through mourning. Using a limited palette and warm color, I explore the emotional tension between illumination and shadow. The light does not eliminate the darkness. It exists beside it.

That coexistence matters. How do we embrace light while knowing darkness is present? How do grief and loss shape who we are without becoming the only authors of our future? The painting does not provide a simple answer. It offers a place to remain with the questions.

The Fading Reverberation of Memories

The Fading Reverberation of Memories was created in memory of biological my father. Although the relationship had it highs and lows- his absence still leaves it mark. Here, an empty restaurant becomes a silent witness to the passage of time. The room once held conversation, movement, and shared experience; now it is suspended in stillness and muted light.

That stillness reflects what can follow the death of a family member, friend, or colleague. Life continues, but familiar spaces feel altered. Absence becomes almost physical. A vivid yellow line passes through the scene, illuminating fragments like a thread of memory. It guides the eye through the darkness while reminding us that remembrance is never complete or fixed.

Two paintings hang on the restaurant wall. Their forms are fleeting and partially obscured. For me, they hold a question about legacy: What will people experience of us after we are gone? Memory preserves, but it also changes. Details soften. Stories are retold. What remains is not a perfect record, but an imprint.

The painting invites viewers to consider both the past they inherited and the marks they are leaving now. Mortality is not only about an ending. It is also about relationship, responsibility, and the meaning we create while we are here.

Art as Witness and Advocacy

My practice is shaped by neo-expressionist energy, layered surfaces, lived experience, and the psychological insight I bring from social work. It also exists within a broader history of artists who transformed fragmentation, memory, and Black life into visual language. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s urgent marks, Romare Bearden’s collaged memories, Jack Whitten’s material experimentation, Kerry James Marshall’s insistence on Black presence, and Pablo Picasso’s fractured forms offer touchpoints for thinking about rupture and reconstruction.

Yet influence is not imitation. My own visual narratives emerge from foster care, childhood adversity, grief, advocacy, and the effort to reframe clinical labels that can flatten a person’s humanity. Texture becomes evidence. Darkness becomes a setting rather than a conclusion. A line of color can become a route back toward hope.

This is where art, psychology, and social work meet for me. This linear thread ask us to pay attention to the person before us. Each require empathy without pity. Each can make room for stories that institutions have overlooked or misunderstood.

An Invitation to Feel, Witness, and Affirm

These paintings are not requests for viewers to solve grief or explain trauma. They are invitations to be present. To feel what the image awakens. To witness the child, the survivor, the mourner, and the person still becoming. To affirm that vulnerability is not weakness and that healing does not require us to forget.

Mortality can make life feel fragile, but fragility is not the same as meaninglessness. The flame matters because it can go out. Memory matters because it can fade. Our presence matters because it is temporary.

What light are you protecting in the midst of darkness? What memories continue to reverberate in the spaces you inhabit? And what imprint of care, courage, or hope will you leave behind?

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