How art helped me grapple with grief | Navied Mahdavian

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Much like pictures, cartoons can say so much with so little. New Yorker cartoonist and writer Navid Marevian has spent years distilling huge concepts and emotions into drawings on the page. In his 2024 talk, Navid shares the lessons he's learned from doing it, and why for him, life's greatest lesson is to remember that in the end, words are almost never the point of communication anyway. Coming up.

0:48When I found out my grandmother, my last living grandparent, was dying, my first thought was, I need to draw her hands. I'm a visual artist, a cartoonist for The New Yorker, and comics writer, so drawing is how I understand much of the world. For a long time, my cartoons had been impersonal. Commentary on the world around me, sure, but not really about me. The closest my personal life got to influencing my cartoons were cartoons I lifted from things my friends and family had said around me. It was only after my daughter, Elika, was born that my personal life began to creep into my cartoons more.

1:25Every artist will tell you that their medium is the highest art form. But they're wrong, because cartooning is in fact the highest art form. Cartoons can say so much with so little. With just a few lines, you can express happiness, smugness and sadness. This is called face pareidolia. It's the phenomenon where we see faces in inanimate objects. We see ourselves in these cartoonish faces. They're blank canvases onto which we project ourselves. We see faces everywhere, ourselves and everything. It's evolutionary, a survival technique. But how do we convey complex emotions using just lines? Emotions like grief.

2:15This became really important to me when I found out that my grandmother was dying. I got to know my grandmother, Homa, in a way I didn't get to know any of my other grandparents, because they all lived and died in Iran, a country I've only ever been to twice, and not since I was 10. But Homa lived with my parents for the last 10 years of her life, and in that time, she danced the funky chicken at my wedding, she got to hold my newborn daughter, and she told me stories about Iran before the revolution over morning tea, which was usually around noon because she liked to sleep in. One of my earliest memories is of her hands.

2:53Not the way that they looked, but the way that they felt. I can still, even today, recall the physical sensation of them, like the smoothness of her nails and even their smell, but not the way they looked, which is why when I found out that she was dying, my first instinct was to try to preserve that memory, my memory of her, by drawing her hands. Not surprisingly, when I finally made it there to see her, I didn't have a whole lot of time to sit around drawing because I was busy with other things, things like comforting my mom, comforting my grandmother by doing magic, and helping my mom and my sister plan for what would come next.

3:33It's that classic Proustian experience. Life doesn't mean anything while you're moving through it. It's only when you stop to reflect on it that you can make any sense of it. Sense memory, what Proust calls involuntary memory, contains the essence of the past. And so if I wanted to tell the story of my grandma, Homa, I would have to begin with a sensation of her hands. When I set out to write this comic, which was published in the LA Times, I wanted to take something complicated and big and make it small. Grief is complicated. I needed to reach a point where I could process my loss to distill the experience of losing my last living grandparent into its essential parts and make it clear enough that I could actually grieve.

4:19My family doesn't tend to deal well with grief, which isn't great because we have so much experience with it. When we're trying to dodge grief, we caricature those we've lost. We focus on and exaggerate their most obvious features, which is why sometimes we'll hear somebody say something like, he was a saint. He probably wasn't. When we do that, we're not actually grieving. We're not confronting the person we've lost as a complex individual, flaws and all. Cartooning has allowed me to go narrow, to find the details that are emblematic, which opens up into a whole, rich, complex person, and to my complicated relationship with them.

5:03It avoids flattening them and leaves them their richness so I can grieve all of them. And so I focused on my grandmother's hands, the quivering lines of her arthritic fingers, the contours of her veins, now pronounced by the thinning of the skin that she spent so much time caring for. They were beautiful hands, soft from years of moisturizing. They were also the hands of someone who was really, really vain, emblematic of the gender norms of an Iranian woman of her period, and as a consequence, incapable of dealing with the process of aging well. For example, I can remember this one time she called me into her room, and when I walked in, she was standing there, arms stretched out to her side and topless, and she said, Look what I've become.

5:57They were also the hands that she used as she got older and was less capable of caring for herself to hit those around her, the people she loved the most. Because I didn't actually get to draw her hands when I last saw her and I don't have any photos of them, I had to use my own hands to draw her hands. So I drew my hands old and spotted, my knuckles gnarled, and I imagined what it would be like for my hands to no longer be able to perform basic everyday functions, to no longer be able to draw. I regularly use myself as a reference for my comics, and through this, I've become my grandmother, I've become my friends, and I've even become my five-year-old daughter.

6:37It's a process that's allowed me to experience these stories more deeply in a physical way, allowing me to inhabit them, to come to a fuller, richer understanding of them in context. If a loved one's death makes us confront our own mortality, then the process of physically transforming myself into my grandmother or my father, who is slowly dying of kidney failure, has made me confronted in a uniquely deep way. It's a process that's also allowed me to reach a place of deeper empathy and of forgiveness. For me, art is about communication. It's about expressing what's most important to us and knowing that other people feel the same way, that we're not alone, which is particularly important when we're grieving.

7:28It's that distillation of something complex into its simplest terms. For you to see your grandmother or a parent in the curved lines of my grandmother's beautiful hands and to communicate without words, because words were never the point anyway. Thank you. Thank you.

7:56That was Navid Madhivian at TED Next in 2024. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curationguidelines. And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmanivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faze-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.