What Grief Feels Like

I didn’t set off knowing what I was going to create last week, but it ended up as something of a visual expression of what grief feels like.

I started off with the words “I’m okay” in my head, evolving this into the all-caps I’M OK.

I set this in 120 point Akzidenz Grotesk, using a comma for an apostrophe:

I sliced up some letter-sized Staples house-brand 67 lb. card stock into cards 5½ by 4¼ inches in size to print on, just large enough, give or take, to qualify as a postcard for mailing.

Since seeing a printer mix inks with a palette knife the other day, I’d been eager to try this out for myself, and so I started with white and added just the faintest touch of yellow

Seeing that I’M OK hovering on the card, barely visible in some lights, I was struck suddenly with the feeling that a very tentative sense of “I’m okay” was something I’ve felt frequently over recent months. But it’s not always tentative: sometimes it’s very strong. And sometimes it’s halfway in the middle.

So I added a little more yellow, and printed some more obviously-yellow cards. And then added some red to get some orange cards. And then even more red to get what amounts to a bold declaration, more an “I’m okay!” than an “I’m okay.”

Put together in a montage, these various shades of being okay ended up becoming something even more familiar, the ebb and flow of being okay, and not being okay, and being very okay, and then shudderingly not being okay at all. That is what grief feels like. And I accidentally found a way to express it typographically.