Liz Maugans - Whiter Shade of Pale (Procol Harum): For Tom and Muriel Campbell


Liz Maugans - Whiter Shade of Pale (Procol Harum): For Tom and Muriel Campbell
Print Media & Collage
42”W x 52”L
2026
I have written eulogies for people I loved. I’ve sat with funeral directors that are complete strangers and had to make choices that felt impossible: selecting flowers, remembrance cards, readings, suggested rituals. Faced with catalogs of stock images and familiar motifs—roses, doves, sunsets, crosses, landscapes—we are asked to choose something that will somehow stand in for a life. Something appropriate. Something suitable. Something that says this was them.
Perhaps you have done this too. It always feels unfair. How can a bouquet, a photograph, a poem, or a folded card contain the enormity of a person? How can any arrangement of symbols come close to expressing the avalanche of missing that follows loss? We are asked to distill a beloved life into a handful of decisions while grief is still unfolding around us.
And yet, we do it. Again and again, across centuries and cultures, we gather the dust-in-the-wind fragments and order the damn bouquet. We remember this strange human ritual of selecting images and flowers to try and speak- when language fails.