What do you give a grieving friend or relative who doesn’t seem to be springing back from their loss?
Alone with their thoughts in between your visits and phone calls, the Sad, Empty, and Hopeless are asking themselves heart-wrenching questions like: Why me? Why am I still alive? How am I going to get through the holidays?
For someone who hurts physically, mentally and spiritually, they will need a sympathy gift that’s more than a gesture. It needs to be a gift that soothes their broken heart in your absence and the absence of their loved one. A gift that nudges them back into the world of the living while calling up only the most positive memories of the deceased. A picture capable of inspiring the grieving to rouse themselves, and act in their loved one’s memory. In a word: wishful reality which can restore hope in ways that the ordinary sympathy gift can not.
So-called “personalized” sympathy gifts abound, but most are off-the-shelf items. There are frames or lockets that come with free engraving and a place to slip in a photo. But for someone who is greatly pained by looking at photos of their loved one, that can be far from comforting.
But what if their favorite photos are repurposed into a “visual eulogy” — an amazing portrait of who your loved one was, or where they are now? Through a unique art form called prescriptive photomontage, wellness comes through positive visualization. The prescriptive artist listens to the happier stories behind the photos and then creates a new “preferred story” called a Healing Dreamscape, that acts like a soothing dream. Fabricated from personal photos and the artist’s own photographs, the resulting custom artwork is nothing less than transformational.
> Read the full story behind Annie V’s Healing Dreamscape
Everything in the final print looks completely real as if all the objects, people and places in the picture were there from the very beginning … only they’ve been deliberately put there by the artist:
- to evoke new memories of the deceased, rather than stir up longing and regrets
- to continue a bond with the deceased
- to create a tangible object to talk to in their absence
While sympathy gifts are always the safe choice, they still keep you at a safe distance from the griever. Nothing brings both parties closer to each other and the deceased than a Healing Dreamscape. You can find a digital collage artist to make this artistic memorial portraits right here at Art For Your Sake.
