What Grows from Grief

by Stephanie Chatfield

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William Holman Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil is a painting that commands attention. Encountering it in person is an experience that’s hard to walk away from — It’s large, immersive, and emotionally rich. Isabella looks almost startlingly real and her presence draws you in, quietly overwhelming.

I am fascinated by both the painting and the story behind it — a tale first told in Boccaccio’s Decameronand later reimagined in a poem by Keats.

Isabella, a wealthy young woman, falls in love with Lorenzo, a servant in her household. Her brothers, eager to arrange a more ‘suitable’ marriage, view the affair as a threat to their social ambitions. So they kill Lorenzo.

Later, his ghost appears to Isabella and guides her to where his body is buried. In her grief, she exhumes him, severs his head, and buries it in a pot of basil. She tends the plant obsessively, watering it with her tears, wasting away as the basil thrives.

It’s a gothic love story — romantic, macabre, and melodramatic. But beneath the narrative drama is something more enduring and meaningful.

Nothing ends—everything changes.

We all face pain, despair, and grief. These moments can feel permanent, as if we’ll be stuck in them forever. But even in the darkest soil, something grows. It might not be what we wanted, but it becomes part of our story nonetheless.

The basil in Isabella’s pot becomes a powerful symbol of this transformation. It grows from death and decay, nourished by tragedy. Isabella herself, however, withers away, consumed by her loss. The contrast is stark — and familiar. We, too, pay a price for whatever we feed with our attention and energy.

Obsession, if left unchecked, can hollow us out.

There’s also another layer of life and loss embedded in the painting. Hunt used his wife Fanny as the model for Isabella while she was pregnant. As the painting took shape, so did their child.

But Fanny died in childbirth. What began as a portrait of fictional grief became a deeply personal memorial. Hunt finished the painting after her death, and in doing so, gave Isabella’s sorrow even more resonance. Fiction and reality merged — both Isabella and Hunt became figures trying to live with loss.

The story of Isabella and Lorenzo offers no happy ending. But not every story needs one. I don’t need art to wrap everything up with a bow or offer forced optimism. What I need — what we all need, sometimes — is art that confronts pain honestly. That makes room for sorrow without explaining it away.

Because when we allow ourselves to look at the ugliness — really look at it — we can begin to understand it. And in that understanding, we might find something beautiful still glimmering within our lives. That beauty is real. It’s worth holding onto. And works like Isabella and the Pot of Basil help me to do just that.

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