National Grief Awareness Day
Grief is one of the oldest and most enduring aspects of the human experience. If you haven’t yet experienced grief, it’s unfortunately likely to happen. The term ‘grief’ encompasses all of the emotions around a loss, and ‘mourning’ is defined as the external expression of the pain. Throughout human history, there have been many attempts to describe and heal grief, and they have changed significantly over the years. In this blog post, we are featuring an author who explores the act of grieving in connection with practice of self-care to reveal the unique relationship that the two share.
We are thinking of you and wishing you moments of peace and comfort as you remember someone who was so close to you.
The Whole Thing is the Hard Part: On Painting My Nails
An excerpt a book, Here After:
I have painted my nails my entire life. When I was young, I remember my aunt, Julie, who is and has always been, a glamorous woman having perfectly finished nails. I first began getting my nails done when I was in my teens, perhaps most notably after the time that my parents went out one night and I decided to paint my nails. I shut myself into the study and set out the required tools: a few bottles of polish, bottle of polish remover, polish remover pen (for the edges), cuticle trimmer, cuticle oil, nail file, nail clippers. I was fourteen. I couldn’t get the polish to layer evenly and I kept streaking it onto the edges of skin around my nail beds. Over and over I kept removing the polish and trying again. My parents returned home a few hours later and I was still in the study, trying to get my nails right. When my father opened the study door he coughed, asked what I was doing. I was glassy eyed, light headed, unaware of how full the room was of the fumes of remover and polish. I told my mother who was opening a window in the study that I couldn’t get it right. I showed her my fingernails, close to tears. After this, my mother introduced me to the world of professional manicures. One of my earliest professional manicures was French: I remember watching the soft pink base coat glide onto my nail bed and feeling, undoubtedly, wonder.
Nail art dates back thousands of years, encompassing a network of social mores, traditions and roles. And in more modern times: the hashtag #nails has been posted over 150 million times on Instagram alone. Dive into the world of nail art on TikTok or Pinterest and you will find yourself swimming in a visual world of art literally at your fingertips. Move even further into the study of nails and you will quickly find yourself in a conversation about the ways in which nail art and nail color is embroiled with and often symbols of classism and cultural appropriation. The color red alone is a consistent marker of the elite—a traditional understanding that finds its roots with the Chinese who are often identified as the first creators of nail polish in 3000 BC. The women, in those times, that could afford to have their nails dyed with a brew of egg whites, gelatine, beeswax, and floral dyes were presumed too wealthy to need to work in the fields (from The Guardian article by Fetto).
When Kurtis died in August 2020 my extensive team of healthcare professionals—psychiatrist, psychologist, family doctor, vascular surgeon, internal medicine and thrombolysis surgeon, grief counsellor and vocational rehabilitation consultant—all urged me to rest. In particular, my vocational rehabilitation consultant urged me to find something weekly, even if it was small, that I could do that felt like self-care: defined as “something that took a step toward the person I had been before Kurtis died.” I told the consultant I couldn’t think of anything. I’m not prone to rest. Grief had destroyed my sense of self. The consultant, in turn, suggested lists upon lists of things that might fit the billing: adult coloring books, bath salts, video games, skincare masks and on. Finally, after weeks of declining all of the consultant’s suggestions I remembered nail polish.
Having my nails painted, I told the consultant, has always made me feel more like myself, more together.
Great, the consultant responded. Let’s get your nails painted once a week.
The issue was, of course, that it was in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic and all nail salons were closed. So, I would have to paint my nails myself: for the first time since my teens.
