At our last session A+ therapist mentioned that we could make a collage to represent life before and life now. I immediately jumped at the idea as I had no idea we could have been doing arts and crafts this whole time instead of unpacking the debris field of grief one piece at a time. Arts and crafts time sounded like a lot more fun and a lot easier. I should have known a therapy collage is much different and a lot less fun than just creating a collage on my own at home. The jury is still out on whether it’s more fun and easier than soul spelunking and removing each piece of debris grief left behind.

We started the LB (Life Before) and LA (Life After) collage this morning and it wasn’t nearly as fun as I had imagined it would be. As I was gluing sayings and pictures to a poster board I was immediately brought back to my classroom and how enthusiastic preschool students are about glue. They would crank the glue stick all the way to the top and then use mountains of glue to just glue one tiny piece of paper. Many of their art projects ended up being more designs made with glue than anything else. This memory made me smile and then like all teaching memories made me sad and long for what was.

I have included a picture of the in process collage below. Life Before is represented on the left and Life After is represented on the right. The words or phrases in the middle are things that bridge the two together. Things that are present in both lives. You will notice there’s several black lines swirling through the middle. Those aren’t there by mistake.. Those represent the fault lines that have formed between life before and life after. I feel like in August 2022 and March 2023 my life was rocked by two rather large earthquakes. I don’t know what they would measure on the Richter Scale because how does one quantify the strength of life events that leave fault lines running through your life and leave life after looking nothing like life before?

These 2 seismic life events created fault lines and debris fields that aren’t visible to the naked eye. There’s no physical place myself or anyone else can go to see the fault lines and/or the debris field these seismic events left behind and yet they are ever present. They are always with me and I navigate life around these fault lines and I carry the debris field with me. I told A+ that most times I still feel like I have been dropped in a foreign land and I am still learning how to live life on the other side of the fault lines. I am still learning the customs, practices, language, etc of life on the other side of the fault lines. The fault lines are also why life before feels so separate from life after because it feels like life before was destroyed and in it’s place are these fault lines full of debris and there’s no jumping these deep caverns filled with all the things that make up a life to get back there.

I think we all have experiences in life that create fault lines. Deep cracks in the foundations of our lives that split our lives into “Before” and “After”. Some of these fault lines are surface cracks in the foundation and others are so deep they have split the foundation of our life into two. Two separate pieces. Two separate lives. Two separate people.

I have not yet through my collage making process learned how one navigates these fault lines, but I think the first step is just acknowledging their existence. Really looking at them and seeing them. Standing at the edge of these fault lines and feeling all the feelings seeing them and the life they separated brings up to the surface. Yes, I realize that doesn’t sound like fun at all. Most things required to heal grief and move forward are in fact not fun. I don’t know that the fault lines ever go away because once something is cracked it’s hard to put it back together.. evidence of the cracks remain no matter how good of glue one uses. But maybe the goal isn’t to glue the fault lines back together, but instead the goal is to find beauty with the fault lines and figure out how to build some kind of bridge over them.

So, here’s to bridge building, fault lines, and therapy collages.