A Teddy Bear Project

Visual documentation and saying goodbye (or not)

Aug 18, 2024

Bear on a stool in front of a window. A. Cowen 2024

“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

🧸 View post in a browser or in the app for the best viewing.

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.

🧸 Teddy Bear Project — Extra

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.

Portions of Week 33 pages, in progress. Testing the waters with a few bears. A. Cowen 2024

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.

The Plan

I am still not sure I can draw bears. I don’t have a lot of experience with fur. It isn’t the kind of texture that I feel confident about with my pen and ink or with the way I am (now) loosely, using colored pencils.

Beanies are smoother than most of the teddy bears in the collection. Most of the bears do have clothes though. That is part of their charm. Maybe I wouldn’t have been as interested in this project if they were all just brown bears, no edges or details to hang onto.

But over the last several weeks, the idea has persisted.

I will draw the bears.

If I had an extra room, I might try and pull them all out into one space, see the scope of the project. I might make a list, set up a Notion database, photograph them all, make a pile that I can methodically work my way through.

Already, the idea of documenting the bears has broadened a little bit to other knick knacks, things that I look at and think “I don’t need to keep those.” Cat salt and pepper shakers are sitting on the window sill for that reason. They are cute. I like them. They remind me of our cat years. But they are empty. I don’t need them. I should get rid of them, and yet I look at them and think, “I should draw them. First, I should draw them.”

My project right now may be to draw my life, the life we had, somehow record this life as I say goodbye to it.

Can I draw fast enough?

Logistics

Because I scaled down to a smaller sketchbook the bears feel a little bit intimidating. Many of them are large. Fitting them in this small space may be a challenge. (I tend to draw large.)

I want to capture them, edge to edge. I want to frame them and distill them and mine them for the stories they hold. (I have no way to fill in the blanks.)

I somehow want to do them justice.
I want this collection to be my tribute, my goodbye.
I love this project already in the abstract.
I may not be able to draw fur, but I’m willing to at least get some contours in.

I needed to start. I needed to feel that I am not just standing still.

There are probably, really, only a handful, but there are enough.

I pulled out a couple of the smallest bears and started thinking about what this series looks like. Does it go in my illustrated journal? Or does this warrant a dedicated sketchbook? I’m torn.

My current approach is that everything goes in the illustrated journal. I like to keep everything together and at least loosely contiguous in time.

But with the bears, I am not sure.

I want the bears nestled in with my life, with my record of these days, and yet I also want a pristine series, a set of individual drawings. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve leaned towards pulling these out of the journal. Maybe I’ll do a few of them more than once. Maybe I’ll do them in the journal but give them space, let them sit alone on pages.

I worry that I am starting a series of life documentation that may keep me stuck in the past for years.

I worry, and yet I also find comfort in that idea.
There is comfort, too, in knowing “what” to draw, in having a list or a pile, in knowing what’s next.
These bears may become my tagalong collection because they offer that.
I may draw some of them again and again.

I may still buy a pad of heavy-duty paper or Bristol specifically for this project. But for now, I’ve drawn a few small bears in my illustrated journal just to see how they feel.

They have felt surprisingly soft.

My goal is to draw at least one a week as part of my pages. But that’s a loose goal. If I decide to draw one a day, that’s fine.

As expected, I really don’t have any grasp of how to render fur. I guess I’ll learn something.

Fuzzy wuzzy wasn't very fuzzy, was he?

Pen and ink? Colored pencil? An ink wash exploration? Watercolor?

What will I discover?

There is something about this project that makes me feel close. One of the things that has happened as I have cleaned shelves and moved things around, sorted out jewelry and papers and notes and photos and skincare products and bags of medicines and everything else that is sitting around that was someone’s things, is that I have felt this overwhelming need to piece things together, to understand.

This is archaeology.

So I think there will be a few drawn bears. I think it may be the tip of the iceberg, but the bears have an immediate pull for me. They are the catalyst.

This project may be a clever way to put off coping or dealing or sorting or culling, but the bears mean something. They will keep me occupied.

I keep thinking I’ll probably end up doing some of the Beanie Babies, too. That really could see me through years (and does feel a bit crazy). (I’m also scared to open the bag they are in.) I know they have no value now, but it might be fun to draw them.

I often think of that book where the artist drew her receipts and the things she bought as she ruminated on consumerism and on the things that we buy.

I think Maira Kalman would understand my need to draw these bears and why drawing bears isn’t always quite what it seems on the surface.

What could go wrong? Worst case scenario is that drawing the bears means I find it impossible to get rid of the bears. I don’t really think that will be the case for “all” of them. (I expect to find some that I don’t want to draw at all.)

I guess it might turn out that I really don’t enjoy drawing bears (or that I really suck at it).

I’m not accomplishing much these days. I know winter is coming. I’m thinking maybe I’ll draw the bears.

Photos from the Week

Coffee cup and keyboard — Photos, A. Cowen 2024

Weekly Bits and Pieces

Writers to Read: A Chance Find

I have read many wonderful and beautiful pieces on Substack recently. There are writers I read every week, and I am always reading new pieces, scanning for voices that are hitting a certain note right now for me.

In looking at a recent piece by

Rebecca Holden

(Dear Reader, I’m Lost), a drawing of a teddy bear caught my eye. I dug around in an Art and Treasures series she did last year, and I found the post with the bear. The story… is charming. The drawings of the teddy are wonderful. This was such an unexpected find and, somehow, so fitting this week.

Made It?

Thank you for reading. I appreciate your comments. Let me know what stands out for you, what you think after reading, or where we connect.

There are so many things here unsaid, angles and edges that are part of what feels like an overwhelming process right now, one that extends far beyond even this too-long post. Some days, I just stand in front of shelves, trying to see the path.

It is hard sometimes sharing narratives that are lifted out of something larger because I know I haven’t fully explained myself. I have probably exhausted your ability to care, but I haven’t exhausted my quest to map the terrain and pull it all together. (The “extra” post has some of the overflow, but I think I will be circling these topics for a while.)

Please respect that there is no single way. I know some people have no problem detaching, decluttering, or purging. I am aware of books like The Swedish Art of Death Cleaning. (I started it a few years ago and will be reading it at some point this fall.) I appreciate that this is such a personal process, and I know many of you have gone through similar sorting and simplifying and decluttering in various ways.

Struggling with letting go even as I desperately want to simplify my life is a recurring problem for me, but this time is, of course, different. Not only am I alone in making these decisions, but the quantity has doubled, the responsibility has doubled, my need to see the future has doubled.

Thank you for your generosity in reading.

Did you have a special bear? Is there a bear you’ve kept as a reminder of someone?
I know you. I know there are some of you with a Beanie Baby or two tucked away. When I find them now, I tend to dump them, but if I get up the nerve to open the bag downstairs, I think documentation will ensue.
What will you draw this week?