Through the screen, a writer friend listened closely, lamenting with me over a sorrowful situation. She shared briefly about a similar experience, took in my pain, paused, and then leaned in. “Make art from it,” she said. I blamed stress and suffering as the source of my creative paralysis. But her prompting reminded me: I had witnessed a rare courage in a beloved writing client and friend, a woman who embraced creativity as a healing force. Making art was an act of self-compassion and empowerment that brought beauty where there had been brutality.
We discovered early on in working together that she and I had both endured adverse childhood experiences. Her experiences were more difficult than mine, but our shared understanding of suffering created a sacred ease to our conversations and creative process. As I coached and edited, helping this survivor steward her words and nurture her art, I watched her form every essay, wildflower bouquet, collage, sewing pattern, and brush stroke into a memento of strength.
Creativity was a salve. Writing became a gentle defiance. Quilting turned chaos to order. Paint layered light over shadow, color over pain. In making art, she was remaking her life.
Three years ago this month, a tragic accident took her from us, yet as I follow her artful ways in her absence, grief has become less of a black hole. In her memory, I’m sharing the eulogy I presented at her memorial. You can find the eulogy in the video above or the transcript below. I hope witnessing my friend’s creative courage offers you a more empowering way to go through your suffering.
A Lasting Color: Jacquie Reed as an Artist, Writer, and Beauty Seeker | June 4, 2022, St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, Indianapolis
For more than three years, I had the honor of being Jacquie’s writing coach. During the pandemic, as all of her volunteer activities were on hold at the school, hospital, and elsewhere, Jacquie and I went from meeting monthly at the library to meeting weekly on my balcony, no matter the weather.
We wore our masks and brought all kinds of resources to make ourselves comfortable, everything from a high-powered fan and cold drinks in the summer to electric blankets and hand warmers in winter. “We’re hardy people, Darcy!” Jacquie would laugh, but when it got below 20 degrees, we’d finally give in and meet on Zoom. She wouldn’t socialize indoors during the pandemic, but we would always find a way to meet.
Jacquie leaned into the Creator and the practice of creativity when she was disappointed in life, and we can face this present sadness in the same way.
Each Tuesday, she’d shuffle up my steps with her canvas bag on her shoulder. (We writers always seem to come with extra luggage.) Inside her bag were her file folders and essays, laptop, sketchbook, pencils, stray notecards, and a book or two. Often, Jacquie would have to make two or three trips down to the car and back up to the balcony to bring all of the crafts or pieces of art that we’d need to photograph to post with her essays and poems on her blog.
On Jacquie days, as we called Tuesdays around my house, one or more of my children would always make their way up to the balcony and peek around to say hello. They were drawn to the way Jacquie delighted in them, the way she would sit up in her seat and ask with excitement about their latest piece of art or their afterschool activities. She could never say no to whatever bracelets, slime, or other craft items my daughters were selling in the front yard on any given day. She was a fixture in our lives. It was very hard to tell my kids that Jacquie wouldn’t be coming back. Our Tuesdays would never be the same without Jacquie’s care and creative energy.
Pursuing creativity was a way of caring for herself, too. Writing and art were empowering forces as she faced the trauma endured early in life, and the anger, confusion, and sadness that came with it. Creativity not only helped her process pain as it surfaced, but discover the real artist self that had been hidden beneath it. Jacquie wrote poems all the way back in elementary school and believed if someone had paid attention and nurtured her along the way, she might’ve accomplished completely different things in her life. But what others hadn’t done for her in childhood, she would begin to do for herself as an adult.
In recent years, Jacquie invested in her creativity through art classes, auditing a religion and arts program at IUPUI, personal therapy, spiritual direction, and writing coaching. Imagining, scribbling notes, drafting, revising, and revising again are not just parts of the writing process to make a piece more pretty or publishable; they are acts of exploration that helped her connect more deeply with God’s movement in her life and behold beauty in the broken world.
Imagining, scribbling notes, drafting, revising, and revising again are not just parts of the writing process to make a piece more pretty or publishable; they are acts of exploration that helped her connect more deeply with God’s movement in her life and behold beauty in the broken world.
Her early years were spent in survival mode, but adulthood would provide the freedom and safety she needed to grow into her fuller self. Beginning with her time in the college classroom and then the steady and safe environment that she and Mike created together in their home and circle of friends, Jacquie could finally grow to discover who she really was as her own unique person.
Over these decades, she created an atmosphere of creativity everywhere she went. She provided blank pages and plenty of art supplies and cheerful attention for her daughters, and at the same time explored arts and crafts like embroidery and quilting with her own hands. She has been incredibly proud to see both of her daughters grow up to experience the joy of art in their hobbies, teaching, and design work. On the balcony, I would often get a report on a creative project Sarah was doing with her students or a colorful element Anna had posted on instagram in recent days. And of course, Jacquie had artistic visions for the grandbabies, too. It brought me joy not too long ago to see a picture of Jacquie’s grandson coloring at the art table she had picked out for him prior to her passing.
“Art is where you see it,” Jacquie wrote. She noticed colors and patterns wherever she looked, whether in nature or the designs on airport carpet. She wrote this about creativity as she began to travel after so many months of pandemic sheltering: “Even though parts of my life were in lockdown, my creativity and relationship with God were thriving. Now as I emerged from my quiet pandemic patterns to travel again, my senses felt like curious young children. They were new and ready to receive. The ordinary looked extraordinary. Art seemed to be everywhere…. I came home with poems lined up in my head like airplanes ready to take off.”
The things you and I might toss into a drawer or the trash or crumple into our pockets, Jacquie transformed into thought-provoking works of art. I’m thinking particularly of the counseling receipts and tear-soaked kleenexes that she turned into an art project, and her creative way of dealing with sympathy cards in the complicated grief after her parents’ deaths.
At first Jacquie was resistant to the sympathy cards. Most people at that time were unaware of her difficult childhood, and the well-meaning messages on the cards were an unfortunate reminder that Jacquie’s early years had been anything but ideal. But with time, she began to appreciate the colors and designs on the cards and receive the love that was communicated even if the writer of the card had been unaware of her troubles. Her previous writing coach, our friend Ann, suggested she try writing “found poems,” cutting out helpful words from the cards and arranging them into something meaningful. Then, her art teacher invited her to transform the sympathy cards altogether by tearing them into small pieces and making new paper from the scraps.
I felt God softening my heart, a feeling I had not experienced for many months.
I was like the paper, beginning a transformation.
Here’s how Jacquie described that process:
“My art teacher and I stood next to the tub watching the paper gradually absorb the water. At the same time, I felt God softening my heart, a feeling I had not experienced for many months. I was like the paper, beginning a transformation.” As they were cleaning up, Jacquie noticed pieces of the sympathy cards still floating in the tub of warm water and decided to take them home. After they dried, she said, “I trusted God to lead me to further exploration with the fragments in front of me. I sorted them by color, and size. One night, I threaded a needle with white thread, and sewed the pieces together, making an X, a strong, basic embroidery stitch I remembered from long ago. Each night I sewed more of the tiny pieces of paper. God guided the direction of the pattern. I worked on the pieces for about three weeks, and had a strong sense when it was time to stop. I looked at what I had made – something done completely with God’s guidance – a paper quilt. Sewing the pieces each day, moving the needle in and out of the dried, curled paper, slowly brought a sense of calm to my heart, reminding me how I felt God’s presence when I quilted…. The turmoil was gone, my body relaxed. I was in awe of God’s goodness and use of these cards and this craft to help me when no one else was able to soothe the place of my deep wounding.”
In recent years, when her counselor offered a series of words week after week and invited Jacquie to use art as therapy, Jacquie made it a completely immersive experience. The word “meadow” one week would lead her not just into her imagination, but into a search for actual meadows near her home, which she had never thought to visit before.
Here are her words describing her first meadow visit: “Exploring new places brings me delight, expectation, wonder, discovery, and curiosity…. Approaching the meadow, I felt its openness. The field was filled only with nature, not cluttered with buildings or houses or sheds. I felt my heart and mind expand in this open area. The sky seemed to blend with the flowers and tall grass. A few small butterflies were exploring the meadow with me. Each one stopped to rest on a flower or plant for a few seconds before moving on to the next perch. Grasshoppers jumped along the way like popcorn popping. Their spontaneity refreshed my senses. In the middle of the meadow, I came to a narrow creek filled with water. I watched the water flow, moving slowly, carving an identity in the bank as it moved. The meadow has become a place of grounding, always ready and waiting for my exploration.”
Jacquie was carving an identity for herself with each poem, essay, or piece of art. Each experience multiplied into a whole handful of ways to capture and share the beauty she found.
Like that narrow creek, Jacquie was carving an identity for herself with each poem, essay, or piece of art. Each experience multiplied into a whole handful of ways to capture and share the beauty she found. On her repeated trips to meadows, whatever the season, Jacquie would gather twigs, flowers, leaves, and other bits of nature to create meadow bouquets as souvenirs of her time. She would sketch her favorite flowers. And she would gather raw materials from the meadow or from neighborhood gardens to create natural dyes for fabric that she would use in quilting.
Jacquie wrote: “When I gather flowers or tree bark or pine cones or other items from nature. I see their beauty. I notice colors, shapes, patterns, and feel the texture. Dyeing fabric with natural color is a story of giving. I appreciate the beautiful flowers in my neighbor’s yard. When a particular flower’s season comes to an end and my neighbor shares the petals with me, I make natural dye or paint, and then transfer the color to fabric. In this process, the flower continues to give. The flower might be dried or seemingly dead but its beauty carries on in the color now soaked into the fabric.”
At our last couple of meetings on the balcony, Jacquie said she had come to a stopping point in writing about the heavy parts of her past. She was ready to move on to something new. We outlined a series of companion essays on spiritual direction that she and I planned to write together in the months to come. I find myself disappointed that I do not get to witness the new works of poetry, memoir, and art that would have come if she had not died last November. But I remember what she wrote about the beauty of those dried “seemingly dead” flowers contributing to a new kind of beauty.
In my own sadness and disappointment about this sequence of events and with all the existential questions that her passing raises about life, death, good, and evil, I remember the simple opening prayers she prayed each Tuesday on the balcony, how she lived and created her works of art with a baseline assumption that God is always present, tenderly attentive, holding, carrying, speaking love over us in joy or pain. Jacquie leaned into the Creator and the practice of creativity when she was disappointed in life, and we can face this present sadness in the same way. Jacquie has left us a model for beholding, creating, and sharing beauty in the world even when parts of the world haven’t been kind to us.
I remember the simple opening prayers she prayed each Tuesday on the balcony, how she lived and created her works of art with a baseline assumption that God is always present, tenderly attentive, holding, carrying, speaking love over us in joy or pain.
In a poem called, “Song for the Turtles of the Gulf,” poet Linda Hogan writes about the scene of a tragic oil spill and the creatures who were victims of it. But rather than remaining focused on the destruction, she draws attention to what was lost by tenderly describing the beauty of the sea turtle while it was still living. Listen to this line from the poem and see if it reminds you of our Jacquie: “…all I can think is that I loved your life, the very air you exhaled when you rose, old great mother, the beautiful swimmer.” The way Jacquie moved through life was itself a work of art. Jacquie treated living things and raw materials with a tender awe and holy affection, and this is the very way I want to go about remembering her. All I can think is that I loved her life. A motherly sage. A beautiful swimmer.
As a partaker and creator of beauty, Jacquie has left us a tangible example of how to work through our anger, confusion, and sadness in her absence. She chose her blog name well: Gather the Pieces. That’s what she did. She gathered the pieces of her identity. She gathered the pieces of her creativity and courage. She gathered the pieces of beauty in her reach. She gathered the pieces not just in a private journal or hope chest, but to share freely with us in letters, on her site, and even in art galleries. Like the dried flowers and other bits of nature that Jacquie gathered to create dyes for her fabrics, Jacquie’s life is a story of giving. She leaves behind a lasting color. Now, it is up to us to gather the pieces of beauty she left for us…and make more beauty.
In the many months since Jacquie’s passing, I have pieced together collages, written poems, and created original songs to help me move through suffering. How has creativity been a salve for you in the past? Which type of art feels like a good direction for a current grief you may be experiencing?
Here’s what Jacquie had to say about our years workshopping her essays and poems. Curious about writing coaching? Through deep reflection and connection, I love helping writers find creative flow, turn ideas into drafts, craft proposals, and revise essays, poetry, and books. Schedule an introductory call to tell me about your creative vision.
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