Grieving Teacher Uses Art Project as ‘Map’ Through Heartbreak

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(Photo: JenniferRodgersArt.com)

An art teacher at a Pennsylvania high school has made art from a heartbreaking inspiration: the death of her father. 

Jennifer Rodgers’ series of artwork details her father’s battle with sepsis — a condition that occurs when the body’s efforts to fight an infection lead to life-threatening inflammation. Her father spent seven painful months fighting it before passing away last year. A month later, Rodgers started her project after reading “The Geography of Loss” by Patti Digh.

“That has been my guidebook,” Rodgers tells NPR about the book. One quote from the book especially resonated with Rodgers: “We are broken open by some of our human experiences.” So she sought to reflect through art how her dad’s illness and death broke open her world. She calls her work “maps,” with which she navigated her way through her grief.

“A map organizes a place in a certain way and we use them to get us from one point to the next,” Rodgers tells NPR. “My maps have become a way to get from a point in my life where I was very much grieving to another point where I came to a resolution with some of it.”

Strata Of Memories

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(Photo: JenniferRodgersArt.com)

Rodgers says the first piece in the series, “Strata of Memories,” reflects something she read about in “Geography of Loss”: the Japanese art of kintsugi. That art form involves taking a broken cup or plate and, instead of throwing it away, fusing the pieces together with gold. “The gold heals the broken piece of pottery and actually makes it more precious and more valuable,” Rodgers tells NPR.

Her piece reflects all the earth-shattering events of her life. Her dad’s ordeal is the piece set off on the right side of the piece and surrounded by white, which represents the gauze used during his hospitalization. The gauze is also a metaphor for “how intertwined we all are as humans, parent and child,” Rodgers writes on her website.

I Wish You the Sunshine of Tomorrow

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(Photo: JenniferRodgersArt.com)

“I Wish You the Sunshine of Tomorrow” also carries a double meaning, both of which are represented by the color yellow. “[I Wish You the Sunshine of Tomorrow] is a line from the prayer my mom chose to be on the back of the mass card for my dad’s funeral,” Rodgers writes on her website. In addition to the sunshine, yellow also references the hospital where her father died. “The ICU room my dad was in on the day he died had yellow walls,” she tells NPR. “Every time we visited him we had to wear hospital gowns that were a bright yellow. [It] was a recurring color in that whole time frame of my life.”

The Last Day

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(Photo: JenniferRodgersArt.com)


As it says in the title, this piece reflects her father’s death at 10:45 p.m. on March 10, 2014. The stitches and jagged lines represent the relentless walking she did between the waiting room and her dad’s room at the ICU the day he died. “[The red is] symbolic of sepsis and what it did to my dad’s body,“ Rodgers tells NPR, "and watching someone die from sepsis, which was truly devastating.”

Rodgers tells NPR looking at these images isn’t all that hard for her. Talking about them, however, is another matter. "To talk about them and actually think about what was happening at the time, that is definitely difficult,” she says.

But she adds: “I don’t know any other way to get through what became the most challenging time in my life. I didn’t know any other way than to make art about it.”

She hopes to use her work to raise awareness of the illness.

“I hope to eventually make a series specifically about sepsis, as a way to educate people so they’re aware,” Rodgers says. “Watching what sepsis does is just devastating. I know it can strike anybody at any time. And having seen it myself, it’s horrible. It’s truly horrible.”

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