How Art Helped Me Grapple with Grief | Navied Mahdavian | TED

18,189 views ・ 2025-05-26

TED


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When I found out my grandmother,
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my last living grandparent, was dying,
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my first thought was, "I need to draw her hands."
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I'm a visual artist,
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a cartoonist for "The New Yorker," and comics writer,
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so drawing is how I understand much of the world.
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For a long time, my cartoons had been impersonal.
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Commentary on the world around me, sure, but not really about me.
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The closest my personal life got to influencing my cartoons
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were cartoons I lifted from things my friends
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and family had said around me.
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[Dolly, twenty years later]
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["I've become my mother"]
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(Laughter)
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It was only after my daughter, Elika, was born,
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that my personal life began to creep into my cartoons more.
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["I have a feeling he understands more than we think."]
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(Laughter)
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Every artist will tell you that their medium is the highest art form,
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but they're wrong because cartooning is in fact the highest art form.
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(Laughter)
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For example --
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["You could have told me]
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[I've been talking to your ass for 15 minutes"]
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(Laughter)
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Not a great example, the next one's better.
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["I know I have a condom in here somewhere."]
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(Laughter)
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I was thinking of the next one.
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There you go.
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(Laughter)
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Cartoons can say so much with so little.
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With just a few lines, you can express happiness,
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smugness
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and sadness.
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This is called face pareidolia.
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It's the phenomenon where we see faces in inanimate objects.
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We see ourselves in these cartoonish faces.
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They're blank canvases onto which we project ourselves.
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We see faces everywhere,
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ourselves in everything.
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It's evolutionary, a survival technique.
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But how do we convey complex emotions using just lines,
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emotions like grief?
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This became really important to me
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when I found out that my grandmother was dying.
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I got to know my grandmother Homa
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in a way I didn't get to know any of my other grandparents
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because they all lived and died in Iran,
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a country I’ve only ever been to twice, and not since I was 10.
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But Homa lived with my parents for the last 10 years of her life.
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And in that time she danced the funky chicken at my wedding,
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she got to hold my newborn daughter,
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and she told me stories about Iran before the revolution over morning tea,
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which was usually around noon
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because she liked to sleep in.
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(Laughter)
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One of my earliest memories is of her hands.
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Not the way that they looked, but the way that they felt.
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I can still, even today,
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recall the physical sensation of them,
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like the smoothness of her nails and even their smell,
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but not the way they looked.
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Which is why, when I found out that she was dying,
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my first instinct was to try to preserve that memory.
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My memory of her by drawing her hands.
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Not surprisingly, when I finally made it there to see her,
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I didn't have a whole lot of time to sit around drawing
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because I was busy with other things.
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Things like comforting my mom,
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comforting my grandmother by doing magic,
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and helping my mom and my sister plan for what would come next.
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It's that classic Proustian experience.
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Life doesn't mean anything while you're moving through it,
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it's only when you stop to reflect on it
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that you can make any sense of it.
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Sense memory, what Proust calls involuntary memory,
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contains the essence of the past.
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And so if I wanted to tell the story of my Grandma Homa,
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I would have to begin with a sensation of her hands.
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When I set out to write this comic, which was published in the “LA Times,”
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I wanted to take something complicated and big
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and make it small.
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Grief is complicated.
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I needed to reach a point where I could process my loss,
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to distill the experience of losing my last living grandparent
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into its essential parts
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and make it clear enough that I could actually grieve.
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My family doesn't tend to deal well with grief,
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which isn't great because we have so much experience with it.
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When we're trying to dodge grief, we caricature those we've lost.
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We focus on and exaggerate their most obvious features,
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which is why sometimes we'll hear somebody say something like,
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"He was a saint."
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He probably wasn't.
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(Laughter)
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When we do that, we're not actually grieving.
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We're not confronting the person we've lost as a complex individual,
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flaws and all.
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Cartooning has allowed me to go narrow,
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to find the details that are emblematic,
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which opens up into a whole, rich, complex person
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and to my complicated relationship with them.
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It avoids flattening them and leaves them their richness
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so I can grieve all of them.
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And so I focused on my grandmother's hands,
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the quivering lines of her arthritic fingers,
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the contours of her veins,
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now pronounced by the thinning of the skin
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that she spent so much time caring for.
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They were beautiful hands, soft from years of moisturizing.
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They were also the hands of someone who was really, really vain,
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emblematic of the gender norms of an Iranian woman of her period.
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And as a consequence,
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incapable of dealing with the process of aging well.
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For example, I can remember this one time she called me into her room,
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and when I walked in, she was standing there,
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arms stretched out to her side and topless, and she said,
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"Look what I've become."
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[Image not available]
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(Laughter)
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They were also the hands that she used,
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as she got older and was less capable of caring for herself,
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to hit those around her,
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the people she loved the most.
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Because I didn't actually get to draw her hands when I last saw her,
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and I don't have any photos of them,
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I had to use my own hands to draw her hands.
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So I drew my hands old and spotted,
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my knuckles gnarled,
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and I imagined what it would be like
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for my hands to no longer be able to perform basic, everyday functions,
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to no longer be able to draw.
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I regularly use myself as a reference for my comics,
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so most of the photos on my phone look something like this.
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(Laughter)
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And through this, I have become my grandmother,
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I have become my friends,
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and I've even become my five-year-old daughter.
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It's a process that's allowed me to experience these stories more deeply,
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in a physical way,
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allowing me to inhabit them,
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to come to a fuller, richer understanding of them in context.
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If a loved one's death makes us confront our own mortality,
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then the process of physically transforming myself into my grandmother
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or my father, who is slowly dying of kidney failure,
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has made me confront it in a uniquely deep way.
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This is a photo I took of myself in my dad's boots and jeans
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for a comic I did for "The New Yorker"
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about accompanying him to dialysis for the first time.
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It's a process that's also allowed me to reach a place of deeper empathy
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and of forgiveness.
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For me, art is about communication.
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It's about expressing what's most important to us
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and knowing that other people feel the same way,
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that we're not alone,
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which is particularly important when we're grieving.
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It's that distillation of something complex into its simplest terms.
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For you to see your grandmother
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or a parent
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in the curved lines of my grandmother's beautiful hands,
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and to communicate without words
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because words were never the point anyway.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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