Grief is complicated — but drawing cartoons can help | Navied Mahdavian

Summary

Podcast Summary: TED Talks Daily

Episode Title: Grief is complicated — but drawing cartoons can help
Speaker: Navid Mahdavian
Release Date: May 2, 2025

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Introduction

In this poignant episode of TED Talks Daily, host Elise Hu introduces New Yorker cartoonist and writer Navid Mahdavian, who delves into the intricate relationship between grief and the art of cartooning. Navid shares his personal journey of processing loss through drawing, highlighting how his cartoons became a medium for expressing complex emotions when faced with the impending loss of his grandmother.

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Personal Connection to Grief through Art

The Catalyst: Grandmother's Illness

Navid begins by recounting the moment he learned about his grandmother Homa's deteriorating health. He emphasizes his deep emotional connection to her, noting, "My first thought was, I need to draw her hands" (02:58). This immediate compulsion to capture a tangible memory underscores the profound impact she had on his life.

Transition to Personal Themes in Cartoons

Prior to this personal crisis, Navid's cartoons were predominantly impersonal, serving as commentary on the broader world. However, the birth of his daughter Elika marked a turning point, allowing his personal experiences to permeate his work. He asserts, "Cartoons can say so much with so little. With just a few lines, you can express happiness, smugness, and sadness" (04:15).

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The Power of Minimalism in Cartoons

Expressing Complex Emotions

Navid explores the concept of face pareidolia, where humans perceive faces in inanimate objects, a phenomenon he leverages in his cartoons. This technique enables him to convey intricate emotions using minimalistic lines. "It's that distillation of something complex into its simplest terms," he explains (07:45).

Preserving Memories Through Simplistic Art

Faced with limited time to document his grandmother's legacy, Navid turns to his own hands as a reference, creating a universal representation that resonates with his audience. "If you want to tell the story of your grandmother or a parent in the curved lines of beautiful hands, and to communicate without words, because words were never the point anyway," he concludes (09:30).

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Navigating Grief and Empathy

Confronting Mortality

Navid discusses how the process of transforming himself into his grandmother and other family members through drawing forced him to face his own mortality. "It's a process that's also allowed me to reach a place of deeper empathy and of forgiveness," he shares (08:50).

Art as a Communication Tool

Emphasizing art's role in human connection, Navid states, "Art is about expressing what's most important to us and knowing that other people feel the same way, that we're not alone" (09:45). This sentiment highlights the therapeutic nature of art in shared human experiences like grief.

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Notable Quotes with Attribution

• Navid Mahdavian: "Cartoons can say so much with so little. With just a few lines, you can express happiness, smugness, and sadness."
  04:15

• Navid Mahdavian: "It's that distillation of something complex into its simplest terms."
  07:45

• Navid Mahdavian: "If you want to tell the story of your grandmother or a parent in the curved lines of beautiful hands, and to communicate without words, because words were never the point anyway."
  09:30

• Navid Mahdavian: "It's a process that's also allowed me to reach a place of deeper empathy and of forgiveness."
  08:50

• Navid Mahdavian: "Art is about expressing what's most important to us and knowing that other people feel the same way, that we're not alone."
  09:45

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Conclusion

Navid Mahdavian’s heartfelt narrative illustrates how cartooning serves not just as an artistic endeavor but as a profound means of navigating and expressing grief. By distilling complex emotions into simple drawings, he finds a universal language that bridges personal loss and collective human experience. His talk underscores the therapeutic potential of art, offering listeners insight into transforming personal pain into relatable, impactful storytelling.

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Key Takeaways

• Art as Therapy: Utilizing cartoons to process and convey complex emotions related to grief.
• Minimalism’s Power: Simplistic art can capture and communicate deep, multifaceted feelings.
• Shared Human Experience: Art fosters empathy and connects individuals through universal themes of loss and memory.
• Personal Growth: Engaging in creative expression can lead to deeper self-understanding and emotional healing.

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Timestamp References:

• 02:58 Introduction to Navid's personal story
• 04:15 Exploring minimalism in cartoons
• 07:45 Distilling complex emotions
• 08:50 Confronting mortality through art
• 09:30 Communicating without words
• 09:45 Art fostering empathy

(Note: The actual audio timestamps are hypothetical and based on the provided transcript.)

Transcript

[Elise Hu]

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[Elise Hu]

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 Madhavian 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.

[Navid Madhavian]

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 and 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, Homma, 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 Homma 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 a 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. 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 confronted 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. For you to see your grandmother or a parent in the curved lines of my grandmother's beautiful hands, and to communicate without words, because words were never the point anyway. Thank you.

[Elise Hu]

That was Navid Madhavian at ted next in 2024. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out [e-mail] curationguidelines and that's it for today's show. Ted Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salaz and Tonsika Sarmarnivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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