I recently lost my sister to cancer. The emotions I felt were like nothing I had ever experienced. Both of my parents have passed and the grief I felt was far different than when they died. As an artist, I realized the only way I could process this new grief was to visualize it. The 5 Stages of Grief series was born. I painted one painting a day for five days. I discovered I was completely exhausted after I completed the last one.

If you are a therapist or a grief counselor and you’re looking for artwork to convey grief, you might want to consider this collection. If you have more than one patient, I would recommend purchasing prints instead of the original. You can find prints available on both my Saatchi page and my ArtPal page.

Before a loss, it seems like you will do anything if only your loved one would be spared. “Please God, ” you bargain, “I will never be angry at my wife again if you’ll just let her live.” After a loss, bargaining may take the form of a temporary truce. “What if I devote the rest of my life to helping others. Then can I wake up and realize this has all been a bad dream?” We become lost in a maze of “If only…” or “What if…” statements. We want life returned to what is was; we want our loved one restored. We want to go back in time: find the tumor sooner, recognize the illness more quickly, stop the accident from happening…if only, if only, if only. Guilt is often bargaining’s companion. The “if onlys” cause us to find fault in ourselves and what we “think” we could have done differently. We may even bargain with the pain. We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We remain in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt. People often think of the stages as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one.

Source: Grief.com