This coin was born from my own grief, and it was a long time coming.

I had always searched for an image that could give shape to what I was feeling. My grief has taken on different forms as time passes, but its weight remains heavy.

I came across a simple drawing of a girl lying on the ground, her cheek pressed to the earth. Beneath her, deep in the soil, rested the animal she loved. That image resonated within me: the quiet connection between above and below, between the living and the gone.

Grief never seems to leave the body entirely.
It settles within us, becoming a part of who we are in this life, deep in our bones.

Even today, seven years after losing my dad suddenly, it still lives in me. My sadness has not disappeared; it has changed shaped. 

Over the past year, I have had the honor of working as a hospice nurse, standing beside families in the most intimate moments of life’s end. I have witnessed final breaths. I have held space in rooms where love and heartbreak exist side by side.

And in that year, I have come to understand something about death: whether it comes suddenly or slowly, the loss feels surreal.

There is often this quiet disbelief from the people left behind, this feeling that someone can be gone while the world continues as if nothing has changed. People still laugh. Traffic still moves. The sun still rises. And somehow, we are expected to carry the weight of that loss while the earth keeps turning.

This coin represents that split.

The two bleeding hearts symbolize the divide between the living and the dead. One remains above the ground, still beating, still asked to continue. The other rests beneath the soil, returned to silence, returned to memory.

But they are not separate.

Roots connect them, just as love connects us beyond physical presence. What is buried is not gone. It moves through everything unseen: the ground beneath us, the air we breathe, the life we carry forward.

The wolves stand as guardians of that bond, half above and half below the soil. They represent a devotion that does not dissolve when someone is gone.

Grief exists in two worlds at once: the life that continues, and the life that changed forever.

Above the living heart, flowers bloom and birds rise, not because the pain has ended, but because life insists on continuing.

This coin began as a tribute to my father.

But it belongs to anyone who has loved and lost.

Because even when someone is no longer here, the connection remains.

The bond remains.