Navied Mahdavian

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.

It 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.

They 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.

It'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 confront it 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.

It's that distillation of something complex into its simplest terms.