Grief can be a funny thing. When I heard Claire Bidwell Smith talk at Godmothers last month, the author and grief therapist talked about all the ways grief can show up. You can grieve the death of someone, but also the loss of a friendship or “what could have been.” But if everything happens for a reason, that grief is there to teach you something. “Try not to rush it,” Bidwell Smith recently posted on her Instagram page.
Grace Fisher has had to sit with a kind of grief for 10 years. Ten years since she was diagnosed with Acute Flaccid Myelitis. Ten years since she watched her high school friends venture off toward college, toward adulthood, toward life outside their hometown. “My accomplishments and everything I do is a way to distract myself from the loss,” she told me recently.
But her grief has only propelled her forward. It’s allowed her to do so much with what she’s been given — and after 10 years of living with an illness that left her paralyzed from the neck down, she is anything but grieving.
This past July, Fisher returned to Craig Rehabilitation Hospital in Denver, Colorado. It brought back a lot of memories — momentarily shifting her rose-colored view surrounding her therapy, recovery, and diagnosis. Visiting her former therapists alongside new patients reminded her that she was, at one point, where they were, too. “It was super devastating at first,” she says of her life just after the diagnosis. “It’s hard to imagine a life after facing such severe disability. And it was hard for me to imagine that life could be as gratifying as how I pictured it before.”
For anyone familiar with Fisher’s story, we all know that rather than sitting in what she calls “the sadness,” she made a choice to create.
The result was the Grace Fisher Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering individuals with disabilities through the arts. The organization has now grown to include the Inclusive Arts Clubhouse, which serves as the “epicenter” for the foundation’s free music, art, dance, and artistic programming, as well as the Annual Winter Music Showcase, now in its seventh year.
For Grace, it all comes back to those first moments when she was sent to Craig. It was there, alongside experienced therapists and newly diagnosed patients like herself, that she was introduced to music therapy and adaptive art. Art is what kept her going. “When I was at Craig, the arts were so important to my recovery. And my state of mind,” she says. And why, when she worked with Make a Wish that first year, she created a program that would outlive her own wishes and dreams. “Creating the foundation was a way to have my mission last longer than me,” she says.
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In true form, Fisher isn’t slowing down. On Saturday, December 7, the Grace Fisher Foundation will present the 7th Annual Winter Music Showcase. Like in year’s past, Fisher will premiere original music and art. A short film will debut with composition by Fisher and played live on stage by Santa Barbara Chamber Players. “Circle of Grace” was created entirely pro bono by more than 100 filmmakers, artists, friends, and corporations. The concept was presented to Fisher in February by director John Behring and filmed locally in April.
Musician, advocate, and fan favorite Jackson Gillies will also perform a few songs, and Will Breman and a handful of kids from the Music Academy of the West’s SING! Program will also perform. Program participants from the Inclusive Arts Clubhouse, including a group from “Sign, Sing, Dance” will also join the professionals on stage. “This is our premiere event of the year,” Fisher says, noting that all the funds raised from the event will go toward the Inclusive Arts Clubhouse, which opened just over a year and a half ago. Continued support for the foundation, which will break from its fiscal sponsor and become its own 501(c)3 in 2025, will continue to promote the arts among individuals with disabilities.
The Grace Fisher Foundation Winter Music Showcase is Saturday, December 7, at 6 p.m. at The Granada Theatre (1214 State St.). To purchase tickets, see ticketing.granadasb.org/overview/20218. To learn more about the Grace Fisher Foundation, see gracefisherfoundation.org.
