A Teddy Bear Project
Visual documentation and saying goodbye (or not)
“There’s just something about a Teddy bear that’s impossible to explain. When you hold one in your arms, you get a feeling of love, comfort and security. It’s almost supernatural.” – James Ownby
Happy Sunday!
One of the most common pieces of wisdom that you hear when someone dies is that everyone has their own timeline for navigating loss and grief. A corollary is that you shouldn’t make any big changes right away.
Each of us will have a unique path.
Every set of dots is different.
There are undulations.
Today’s post is about starting a new illustrated series, about the ongoing challenge of decluttering and simplifying, and about the charm, whimsy, and quiet sadness of teddy bears. This post is about teddy bears as keepers of memory.
This post is about drawing as a way of processing time and memory and loss, about drawing as a tool.
Thank you for reading.
Amy
Suddenly Everything is Sentimental
The task of clearing and cleaning out things after someone dies can be complicated. Some people leave things untouched, closets full of lifeless clothes gathering dust still years later. Some people need belongings to stay as they were, a diorama of days and habits and routines.
Don’t touch that!
Where did that go? I know it was right there.
We bought that….
Some people begin, right away, to box and bag and rearrange.
At some point, there is a culling required. Whether it happens in stages or in broad strokes, there will be some degree of weeding, of thinning. This is a process steeped in the language of goodbye.
Not all things are equal in the process.
There are levels and layers to what seems meaningful.
Items may be familiar, conduits and gateways, keys that, when held, transport one, instantly, to another moment, another memory. Shape. Color. Smell. A candle, soap, or a whiff of perfume. The sound of an incoming text. The softness of a sweater. Polka dot socks.
Belongings may be pieces of a puzzle you are trying to solve.
I did some initial clearing in the last few weeks. Mostly, I felt like I needed to know what was what. I needed to survey the land. I bagged all the medicines. I sorted a few things that seemed easy and left or boxed other things to deal with in the long days ahead.
I expect this to be a long fall.
A long winter.
I wish I could transplant everything, just lift the entire house and drop it in the woods in Maine somewhere where I could spend a cold snowy winter sorting, processing, and stitching things together in some way that brings understanding, some way to lock memory in place. But of course, there is no snow globe reality.
Clutter Squared
As someone who has tried for a number of years to simplify, and as someone who has too much stuff, I am now in a position where I feel like I have two lives to winnow.
(Note: This post sprawled. This post is about teddy bears and a teddy bear illustration project, but it requires a bit of explanation to get there. Maybe it doesn’t “require it,” but that’s me. I walk the winding road. I have moved the rest of this section to a private post. Thank you to those who support this space. You can keep reading, below. The private part is not about art. It isn’t worth an upgrade. It’s just “extra” because I know some of you are here for all of it.
I’m not going to talk about the different categories of things, each with their own degrees of complexity. Not now. There are some big ones.
I’m ignoring most of it for now.
But I am going to talk about bears.
That’s right, teddy bears.
This is not a “lions and tigers and bears, oh my” moment.
This is something whimsical and tender and inextricably tied up with a life and a childhood and the process of reconciling and constructing and assembling and understanding who we are.
This is, in so many ways, my starting point for navigating my loss.
The only way I know to approach this is with documentation, with cataloging, with making a list of some form, with filling in the stories I know and wondering about those I don’t.
This is instinct.
This is the magic of The Velveteen Rabbit, of becoming real, of knowing beyond surfaces.
“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.” — The Velveteen Rabbit
This is the aura of Paddington with his dapper coat, hat, and suitcase, the charm of Paddington having tea with the Queen and suggesting a marmalade sandwich.
This is not a story about Paddington, although I feel sure there is a Paddington in a yellow raincoat that may turn up.
I know, without looking, that there are Muffys and Bialoskys and Boyds and Steiffs and Gunds.
I was never someone who had a lot of stuffed things as a child, but thirty plus years ago someone was a bear collector.
On trips to Maine in the summer, there were side trips to meet with artisan bear makers. We looked at bears in every store.
Thankfully, there is no space in the house that looks like a scene from a horror movie or even the closet scene from E.T., but there are a number of bears.
It’s been a long time. The collecting stopped years and years ago. Our lives changed. A lot of the bears ended up in the basement in bags and plastic bins. There are other bags and bins of Beanie Babies because, while I didn’t have a history with stuffed animals, I completely fell for Beanie Babies as an adult. (If you’ve seen The Beanie Bubble movie, you know that I definitely wasn’t the only one.)
Doing some preliminary sorting and cleaning, I ran into a number of bears in the basement. For the most part I said:
I’m not deciding about those now.
I need to deal with those later.
Not now. Not now. Not now.
From the outside, I know it probably makes no sense. From the outside, I think the bears seem like low-hanging fruit, especially the ones in the basement.
It’s true, the bears were not my collection, but the bears have lined shelves, plopping and perching and slouching quietly along the perimeter for years. Most of the bears that are still in the living room, I like. I’m attached. They feel like home.
I may not feel as attached to the ones in the basement, but I think there may be some we put away for lack of space that are, really, pretty sweet. I think there will be months of resurfacing.
I did already get rid of some of the bears in the basement because some of the storage bags had been chewed or torn. I didn’t have it in me to take some of those out. But all the others I left because I had one clear thought:
I can draw them.
Maybe it wasn’t simply “I can draw them.” Maybe it was “I will draw them.” I think it was more like “I have to draw them.”
Over and over as I said, “I’m not making decisions about them now,” I held onto a single idea: I will draw them before I get rid of them.
Faced with the magnitude of the decluttering I am now left with, it seems silly to stop and draw everything. But there was something in the idea of documenting the bears that pulled me in, something soothing and mindful. This makes sense. This is me. This is the path.
If I draw them, I will be preserving them in some way and then I can make individual decisions about what to keep or donate. That’s what I told myself.
Drawing Breeds Attachment
This plan to draw the bears, to document this collection, as a way of making it easier to let them go is a flawed proposition. I know that.
I know how often I’ve drawn a truck or a train or a game piece from the boys’ things and found that the act of drawing it made it even more special.
I’m pretty sure my plan to draw the bears as a way of letting them go will backfire.
The circular logic is that when I draw something, there is a real chance that in the process of drawing, I pay so much attention to it, even if only for 10 or 15 minutes, that it means something, and then I might not want to get rid of it. I might want to draw it again. Maybe I’ll draw it better next time. Instead of giving me permission to get rid of something, drawing it often softens it, increases the attachment.
There is a chance, too, that the bears are more entwined in my consciousness than I think.
Many years ago, moved by a beautiful book of photographs of worn teddy bears called Much Loved, I decided to draw bears for the summer index card art challenge.
I wasn’t sure I could draw bears, but I drew a few.
There are simple bears and stuffed things, already, that I return to. I’ve drawn a knockoff rainbow bear beanie a number of times. The same is true for the Blue Dog beanie and a soft blue bear baby’s toy with a rattle inside. I remember drawing a specific beanie with stars on it on the night of the 2016 election.
Update: this post was free at the time of its publication. A paywall has now been added.