Tragedy Revisited in a New Way

During the journaling exercise for the first week of Your Living Canvas we had to write a bit of our history and how it relates to our life now.  One of the major events that I chose to journal was a hard one, but something I needed to do.  Last February, our amazing neighbor, John, was tragically killed in a snowmobile accident not too far from the house.  He was a special guy and we all miss him dreadfully.  I can talk about that night, but I find that writing about it is more difficult.  I am guessing that it is seeing the words on paper that makes it that way.  Somehow, I got inspired to represent that night, the period after and the present in the journal.  I know that it isn't pretty, but I felt that I needed to do it.  Below are the results of my thought process.  I did show this to John's family and they really liked it.  We cried a bit, but they are the bravest people I know and they appreciated what I had created.
For those of you who are interested, I took these photos outside on a sunny day with my Canon EOS Rebel T3 and a 50mm lens.

So this is the first page.  If you read the words, you will get the gist of our involvement.  The face was done in untinted flexible modeling paste and glued on.  I did the words with a Sharpie paint pen (love it).  The flames were sculpted onto the paper with the modeling paste.  I gessoed the pages, then put black gesso over the top so that I could scratch into the layer.  That day was cold and it was nighttime.  We had just had 16 inches of snow two days before.

This is the second page.  I wrote the words "Is that a light in the distance" because it took a while to start to feel better after that night.  The butterflies were punched out of regular cardstock with a Martha Stewart punch.   I mutilated them purposely to show that we were severely damaged.   The calendars were Tim Holtz dipped in white paint.  The clock stamps were from Christy's shop.

Here is the page for the present.  I know that it is totally cliche to use the song "Here Comes the Sun" but it was perfect for this.  The butterflies and sun are made out of (drum roll, please) flexible modeling paste (did I mention it's my new fave?).  I tried to use lots of shades of colors to indicate a lightening of my soul in places.  There is still a lot of black and the family agreed that it is those unexpected black periods that throw you.  The zig zag stitch is Christy's (love it) and for me it represents my world being stitched back together a bit.  I made the flowers using the ends of a couple of paint brushes dipped in paint.  I did edge the pages in black ink and rubbed a little ink over things.