Meet Ksenia J. Merck. For decades, she’s been an esteemed architect, mastering the art of physical structure in large-scale airport design. But Ksenia is also a profound artist and creative storyteller, whose latest project transcends the blueprints of the material world. After experiencing deep personal loss, Ksenia channeled her grief into a mission: posthumously publishing and illustrating her late husband’s science fiction novel, Ghost Flower. This isn’t just a tale of time travel, aliens, and saving humanity in 2035—it’s a testament to a love that transcends time and a powerful tool for healing. Discover how Ksenia used art to navigate her grief journey, find a new purpose, and bring this inspiring, genre-blending story to life.
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Ksenia J. Merck On Artist, Architect, And Creative Storyteller
Ksenia J. Merck is an artist, architect, and creative storyteller whose work bridges structure, imagination, and spirit. With over four decades of leading large-scale airport design programs, she is equally at home shaping physical spaces as she is exploring the emotional and cosmic ones through art. Her latest project, Ghost Flower, is a genre-blending science fiction novel written by her late husband, William F. Merck II, which Ksenia brought to life through her illustrations and posthumous publication. The story and its companion journal reflect her belief in love that transcends time and in humanity’s responsibility to future generations.
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Welcome, Ksenia. It is lovely to see you again. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us.
Thank you so much. It is my pleasure to be here with you and your audience.
I am hoping you can start us off by telling us a little bit about how you got into the work you are doing and what drives your passion for it.
It is a very interesting journey. I have been through several things with my mother passing and then my husband passing very close in time, almost not quite a year and a half later. He had written a third book that he wanted published. After I took some time to collect myself, I dug into the book, and it just really inspired me. He inspired me. I believe that he has been with me on this journey to heal and also to publish this book.
Healing Journey Through Grief
From that, I published a companion journal to go with it, and the entire experience has been really a healing journey for me through this grief. I am coming out of it in a very positive way with this project and really looking at the next part of my life and my purpose with it. To me, it is a story to really help people and to motivate people who have gone through grief because it is very difficult and it is different for everyone. There are a lot of preconceived notions and timelines about grief. This is the first time in my life that I have really just taken the time to do what I needed to do with this. It has been really the right thing for me.
I appreciate your commenting about how people have a preconceived notion of the timeline that is supposed to happen with grief. Being in the field as long as I have been, I am aware of how many people took Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s work and decided that was the gospel. She herself said this is just a guess. There was no research behind 3 stages, 5 stages, or 7 stages. Everybody has their own building on that. Beyond that, people have actually thought in terms of having to go through them in order. If I am not experiencing them in order, I am in denial, or I am blocking myself. Can you share with us what you are learning about the grieving process and what facilitates it best for you?
I am really at a point right now, and I am writing a lot about this right now, because I feel like right now, for me, I am almost really conducting a mini life review. I will tell you that with my mother, who passed over at age 102, she lived with us for fourteen years. Because her decline was very slow, especially from 100 to 102 and a half, I think I was grieving during that period. I was grieving before she passed over. That was just that. She passed over. I went through a series of different waves of emotions. The shocking thing for both my husband, Bill, and me was that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and the doctors said it was a manageable thing.
In January of 2024, it was not manageable. It was not manageable at all. We were in the ICU, in and out of there, for two and a half months. I stayed there every night with him, either in a chair, a bed, or a cot that I bought, because it was just so bad. There was just a shock. That whole experience with Bill in the hospital caused us both to have PTSD. There was a lot of unraveling to do after he passed. That was different than my mother’s passing.
I really feel that he has been here with me, and this project has really been what has given me a purpose. I have said to other people that this grief, at different phases and especially in the beginning, is like a blanket of fog. I am not sure how I was doing all the things I was doing. With this project, I started to get a spark. I know he planted these seeds for me to take this project and run with it.
I could not have asked for anything better or more to really help me through it. There are different phases. I think that they are different for everyone. Certainly, those first holidays for me, major milestones, either my birthday or our anniversary or the first Thanksgiving, the first Christmas, those are off the charts hard. There is year two. That is different, I started to see, and I have just come upon the two-year anniversary of Bill’s passing. In year two, you are really developing a different pattern of how you live your daily life.
I am really looking at that, about how I am going to go forward and what my priorities are, and this project and how I advance things in it. It is a new chapter in my life right now, and I am ready to go do it. There definitely are different phases. I think that the initial circumstance of how a person passes and the circumstances around that really make a difference in terms of how someone might deal with it.
The initial circumstances of a person’s passing—and the context around it—can significantly influence how someone processes the loss. Share on XTell us if you can about the Ghost Flower book that he wrote before he passed, but did not publish.
The Ghost Flower book, it is so interesting because he was in the hospital with prostate cancer, but I believe that he had a very bad reaction to this interaction of drugs, and the doctors could not figure out what was going on. It was this constant seeing how he would react and trying to find a different medicine. He had written this Ghost Flower book about a pandemic set in 2035. This team does some research and stumbles upon this ghost flower that was reported to have healing properties that helped this small village in England.
The Science Fiction Plot And Humanitarian Themes Of Ghost Flower
This team, in the future, part of the team stays in 2035, and part of it goes to 1585, time-travels to find and plant clues about this ghost flower that was brought by aliens thousands of years prior. Here we were in the hospital, and Bill had something that they could not find a cure for. He has written a book about finding a cure, helping to find a cure, planning a cure, and providing a cure for this pandemic in the future. These synchronicities were so amazing to me.
The book is loaded with time travel, the aliens, the healing property of the flowers, and themes about love, soul connections, action, and adventure because they travel to 1585. They do not know what it is going to be like. They ended up meeting pirates face to face and swindlers and Shakespeare. They had all these different kinds of interactions. The book is loaded with a lot of things like that. The overarching theme is saving humanity in the future.
I really look at Bill as a great humanitarian because that is how he approached a lot of things, about how he dealt with things in his life. Once I got into the book, and I was so excited, the plan all along was that I would paint the cover. All these interesting historical characters and places, too, travel to Spain, they travel to North America, and they go to Cuba. All of this is on this catamaran named the Twin Flame. This story about saving humanity really inspired me.
There are 50 chapters in the book, and I started doing these little vignette sketches. They started getting more complex. I started weaving in clues between sketch one and sketch five. During that process, I knew that I would be doing a companion journal to go with it. The journal is actually organized by how I see the sketches working together or fitting together with their clues and their meanings.
I give inspiration about what inspired me about how to do the sketch. I tie that sketch back to where it shows up in the book, with philosophical and spiritual questions that are in the chapters. The companion journal to me is a set together. The whole thing is really a gift to me, and I am excited to share it.
I bet. The idea of his naming the catamaran Twin Flame is startling because here you are clearly playing out what a lot of us would say would be the role of a twin flame.
Yes, he is definitely my twin flame. If you can see the Twin Star on the cover of the journal, when I was drawing and painting that, that symbolizes one soul and two hearts. That is Bill and me. That is our symbol. I am putting that on our grave tablets, and it is just that powerful and that important to me.
Have you always used your art therapeutically?
After my mom passed over, I did. That is when I started. I have done art my entire life. I started doing more painting when my mom passed away. This project really had me in the zone of art. The time spent doing the art took me to a different place in terms of healing because I was really focused on that. I was not focused on anything else. That in itself was just healing. I was experimenting with different things that I had always wanted to try. That was just healing and therapeutic. I took my own time doing that. It did take a lot of time, so I had to block time. That was a really healthy thing for me to do.
I imagine. Most of the people that I have known and work with using art and therapy are tapping into that processing that we have and that we do that goes beyond words. For me, it is so similar to when we find somebody who is trained in somatic or body-focused therapies, where we are bypassing the literal language centers of the brain. There is just such deep richness in there for unraveling our stuck points. We do not have to worry about finding the right word or it bypasses what Freud would call the superego, the part of me that is worried about what you think and what society thinks and what is appropriate in terms of some external source, and just expresses the energies that are there.
Yes, exactly. You use the word energy, and that is huge because I think the energy that I put into this project is really a result of Bill going after this book. He really went after it, and I think he really put it all together in a short amount of time. We had some deadlines for the book to be published. I went after it. That book is a result of how he went after it with a huge amount of energy. I went after it from the art side and from working with the editor to bring it to fruition. That book is a combination of his energies and my energies. That book is our baby. Those energies are all really very positive. For me, when I look at that book, I just get positive feedback from it. That is huge.
The Book Is A Combination Of His And Her Energy
Is there a way to talk about what you are hoping others will take from this?
Yes, I think that what I talked about the spark, I have this project, but other people may have something else that sparks them about a cause or finishing a project that was meaningful to the person who has passed over, or taking up a new cause that celebrates that person or celebrates a new beginning. It is really about, in a certain way, digging deep and seeing what sparks you and then taking that and developing it and running with it and seeing where it goes.
Do not put out a spark. It turns it into a flame.
Yes.
With grief as one of the topics you are introducing here, I am not getting the sense that when your husband was planning the book Ghost Flower and writing it, that grief is the primary focus of that book.
No.
Yet I am getting a real strong sense that you are doing grief work yourself, and your use of the project is helping you resolve your grief, and that is part of what you are sharing with others.
The book itself is not about grief. What I am writing now, based on this experience, is about grief, but this project has really helped me to go on. There are many themes in the book that are also very positive. It really is two things. The project itself has helped me in this grief journey, but the project has merit on its own, with all the various themes about saving humanity.
Questions like “Would you do time travel?” and “Where do we come from?” are all in that book. Bill had actually written two books before this, one on leadership and one on breadcrumbs, finding a philosophy of life. He wove those points and a lot of those themes into the storyline of this book with the characters. Because I know those other two books so well, I can see that in this book, and how powerful it is.
While his book, Ghost Flower, is not specifically focused on grief, your workbook is not either, but it can be used for grief processing or for developing any other kind of project, catching that spark and following it.
The companion journal has a lot of spiritual and philosophical questions that can really inspire people. Who knows what is going to come out of that? There are a lot of really important questions in that journal that are woven into that book. It starts to begin some soul searching. I think that is where you can take that companion journal.
That is useful for any of us, whether we are in the middle of a deep grief process or not.
Yes.
If you would get centered and think about what we have talked about so far in relation to the book and the companion journal, and clear your mind, is there something we want to go back and highlight, or is there another aspect altogether of either of those two books that you want to bring up?
All of this has inspired me to write about this experience and this story. My grief journey is different than maybe some others. I am writing about it and conducting this mini life review. I find that all to be a very positive thing because I think I am starting to understand myself a whole lot better. That is huge. It is only because of going through this project, those philosophical questions, and that I have a purpose now that is different from what it was several years ago.
My grief journey is different from some others’. I’m writing about it and doing a kind of life review. I find it to be a very positive process because I’m starting to understand myself much more deeply. Share on XWhich is right in line with just being awake and alive in life. Life will bring you things that, if you cannot adjust to them, you will bump your head against that brick wall. One of the things I was thinking about is that there is an author whose name will probably come to me who has written about the sixth stage of grief. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross has five stages of death and dying, and people have translated that into grief. He talks about another one, and his step has to do with creating meaning from whatever has transpired that you are generating grief from. It seems like that is exactly what you have done.
I am a different person than I was several years ago, and I am getting back to maybe what my core person is. To have these revelations and purpose is really powerful.
That author’s name is David Kessler, and the book that he wrote is Finding Meaning. When you have meaning, unless you do not want to, you have also got a purpose going on there. You can generate what you are going to use your talents and abilities for to help you create something out of your purpose. Now you have got meaning in your life. Where would you like this to go? We have both the Ghost Flower book and the companion workbook. What do you see coming? What was your dream for how this would unfold?
Future Plans: A Movie And New Books
Several things. I really think that this book has the makings of a movie. It has all of the components to keep people interested, engaged, and entertained in this book, but also those philosophical questions. This project has real merit in progressing as Ghost Flower. For me to continue with this, I am writing a book now, and I am not sure if this will be one or more books because I am writing on a whole series of topics, and then I am going to see where it goes.
As I said earlier, I am really on this mini life review, and a lot of things are revealing to me that I am starting to understand. There are other projects in Merck II Press that we are pursuing, too, with a workbook for the leader book, the first book that Bill wrote. There are more things going to be coming from our company, Merck II Press.
Thank you so much for taking the time to share this with us, and congratulations on both of these and your willingness to use them for your own healing.
Thank you so much. I appreciate you and your time.
Important Links
- Ksenia J. Merck on LinkedIn
- Ghost Flower
- Finding Meaning
- Merck II Press
- Merck II Press on Facebook
- Merch II Press on Instagram
About Ksenia J. Merck
Ksenia J. Merck is an artist, architect, and creative storyteller whose work bridges structure, imagination, and spirit. With over four decades leading large-scale airport design programs, she’s equally at home shaping physical spaces as she is exploring the emotional and cosmic ones through art. Her latest project, Ghost Flower, is a genre-blending science fiction novel written by her late husband, William F. Merck II, which Ksenia brought to life through her illustrations and posthumous publication. The story—and its companion journal—reflect her belief in love that transcends time and in humanity’s responsibility to future generations.
