Anyone who grew up in a Mexican/Latino household is all too familiar with the game Lotería!. It is a bingo-style game where each player is given a tabla (or board) with various, illustrated images of people, objects, and concepts. Some examples of the images a player might come across on their table are: La Sirena (the mermaid), El Cantante (the singer), Las Jaras (the jars), El Sol (the sun) and, La Muerte (death). Each player’s board has 16 images from 54 total possible images. Each board has a 4x4 image layout. There is a cantor, or card caller, who holds a deck of cards [54 possible images that can be present in each player’s 16-image tabla]. Each player has fichas, or markers (small, plastic discs or even beans) to mark the images on their tabla as the cantor calls them out. The game is won by the first player to call Lotería! by connecting 3 or 4 images in a vertical or horizontal line, filling the entire board, or any four-corner section of the board. The game is a pass-time (yes, I say pass and not past), based on total chance, and can be replayed any number of times.

Grief is at the center of the human state of living in a world that experiences suffering. Grief is a state of processing. It is non-linear and looks different for each individual. Grief helps us process loss – the loss of an ideal, something/someone of value, or suffering. In grief, we wrestle with memories, could-have-beens, and the tragic outcomes of reality. Grief greets us with open arms and unlimited free-play.

Because grief can last any length of time, it is usually revisited. [One additional, controversial opinion of grief that I argue is that we must only have a temporary engagement with it.] The longer one spends time recounting and re-affirming grief, the more likely this will lead to over-indulgence and over-dependence.

An analogy: Grief is an emotional pass time. Not a pastime to entertain us, but to allow Time to pass so that we can process. It also has the potential to become an emotional game. Grief can both recognize and lull the pain in our hearts, but it also has the potential to become an addictive emotional mechanism to justify our self-perpetuating fear of moving on from our pain. Without realizing it, the over-indulgent, emotional act of reaffirming our grief becomes addictive. Why? Because the repeated acknowledgment of a loss that brings fear and pain is easier than moving forward from it.

It's not the grief itself that enslaves us, but over-indulging in the idealization of what we lost that becomes the guilty pleasure in our grief. The thing(s) we recount over and over, hoping that this time around we can pinpoint why or how things resulted in the way they did, are the thoughts we build dependence on. You wrestle with the pain over and over, hoping, “This time I’ll win.” One builds a dependence on grief the longer one spends time in it.

Lotería! is an exhibition about grief; the necessity of constraining one’s dependence on grief, and the contrasts between secular and Scriptural grief.