Grief Redacted

This tea cloth chronicles Florence's(Lesley's grandmother) decline into PTSD. The brightly coloured flowers reflect a happy relationship with her high school sweetheart until he headed off to war. The flowers turned black from worry as she waited. After his joyful return, their marriage and the birth of four sons, the colour returned to the flowers. Following the tragedy of her 'shell-shock' husband committing suicide, three sons joining the Air Force and the oldest dying in a plane crash, she stitched only in black. Guided by her religion, bound by nationalist cries of 'for God and country' and deep down being tormented by humanist feelings of guilt and shame, Florence suffered from PTSD as the battle raged within her home. Nine of Florence's descendants have worked on this cloth to symbolize how the effects of PTSD still often go unrecognized, untreated and passed onto future generations.