With Deepest Sympathy

A few years ago (seems like yesterday sometimes), I lost my mother to pancreatic cancer. I had taken family medical leave and my dad and I were her primary caregivers for several months. It was an amazing and harrowing and horrific and blessed time. Afterwards, the hole that had been ripped in our lives was SO HUGE, and it really changed my perspective on sympathy cards. So many of them featured flowers and butterflies and what meaning did that have for me in my grief? It was as though people outside my family were on some whole other planet.

This Judikins Angel Faces cube is my go-to stamp for sympathy cards. The angels remind me of the beautiful art you see in old cemetaries, like in New Orleans, Savannah, London. I love how they look sorrowful, as though they are sharing in your grief.


Each side of the cube was stamped with Tuxedo Black Memento ink on white cardstock, then colored in with Copics in the Warm Gray family (W0, W1, W3). I love how the warm gray makes the beautiful angels look like stone.

This card has a lot of dimension which you can't really see - all the panels are punched up on dimensionals. The black panel was punched with Martha Stewart's Arched Lattice border punch. The background has been stamped with a retired SU background stamp called "Antique" in Adirondack Lake Mist and and sponged with the same to mute it down. Edges were sponged with black. A wide black organza ribbon goes around the entire front face of the card with the ends hidden on the front under the panel. A bow was tied around the ribbon at the bottom. "With deepest sympathy" was stamped at the bottom in Alabaster Fluid Chalk ink.

Inside is a Wordsworth stamp that says "Christ has made of death a narrow, starlit strip between the companionship of yesterday and the reunions of tomorrow" on the right, and the stripe of the black ribbon on the left.

I still miss my Mom. Life goes on, but I look forward to the reunions of tomorrow - hopefully a long way away!! A fellow knitter told me that when you lose someone, it leaves a hole in your life. Like the hole in a sock, time gradually begins to darn the hole, passing more and more strands of yarn across the opening. Eventually, there are enough strands that the sock can once again serve its function, but it will always have a darn. It will be a useful sock again, but it will never be the same sock as it was before the hole was ripped. I find that very comforting!

Whew! I hope this post has not been too gloomy! This is actually one of my favorite cards!