How art helped me grapple with grief | Navied Mahdavian
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You'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.
When 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. Every 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 in everything. It's evolutionary, a survival technique. But how do we convey complex emotions using just lines? Emotions like grief. This 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. Not 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.
It'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 the 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.
My 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.
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