This is the story of how grief turned Esme Saleh into a folk artist
- Last updated: July 23, 2026 | 09:19
It was after the death of her son, Laith, that Esme Saleh decided to become a folk artist. She had always been creative, experimenting with watercolours and learning to sew and embroider at a young age. “I had a creative inkling,” she said, “but I never pursued it.” Everything changed on Aug.17, 2013. When Saleh was nine months pregnant, she woke up with stomach pains and presumed she was in labour. She and her husband, Nasim, immediately went to the hospital, where doctors checked her and put the baby on a heart monitor. Saleh’s blood pressure was high, however, and the baby’s heart rate kept dropping. After about an hour, his heartbeat stopped. Doctors rushed her in for an emergency C-section, but it was too late. Laith did not survive.
Saleh lost a tremendous amount of blood and developed postpartum HELLP syndrome, a dangerous form of preeclampsia, but doctors were able to stabilise her. When she woke up, the first thing she asked was, “How’s my baby?”
“Aug. 17, 2013, was the most difficult day of my life, and Aug. 22 was the second most difficult, the day we drove home with an empty car seat,” she said of her and her husband’s new reality. They named their son Laith Finn Saleh. “His first name means ‘lion’ in Arabic. His middle name is an ode to Huckleberry Finn – sharp wit, kind heart, strong moral compass – all the attributes he’s imparted on us in spirit,” said Saleh, 45. After such a devastating loss, she found it difficult to trust the world again. “It was hard to trust anything,” she said. “The medical system. Myself. It made me realise the fragility of bringing anything to life. We take so much for granted.”
So after years of working as a television producer, Saleh left broadcast journalism and leaned into her creative spirit. She grew up in San Diego. Her mother was raised on a farm in Mexico, and her father moved from Tijuana to Los Angeles to be near her mother, who started working for a family in Sherman Oaks at 16. They eventually settled in San Diego, where Saleh’s father, now a church deacon, worked as a car salesman.
“He always wanted to be a weatherman on TV,” she said, explaining how he hoped to get his big break on television by doing a weather report from the car lot. Saleh wanted to be a broadcast journalist as her father had. After graduating from San Diego State, she interned in the sports department at CBS affiliate KFMB-TV although she didn’t know much about sports. She enjoyed sharing information with people, learned how to write plays of the week and felt she had found the right career.
But during a summer class at Mesa College, she started to think journalism might not be for her. “I’m an empath – a sensitive soul – so when I was reading news about death and destruction, my eyes could not lie,” she said. Her professor told her, “This may not be your thing.” But when she arranged flowers on camera, she really came alive. She decided to work behind the scenes as a producer.
Her professor helped her get her first network news job in 2003, and she moved to Los Angeles, working on hard news and entertainment coverage. After losing Laith a decade later, she couldn’t keep doing red-carpet interviews and acting like everything was fine. “It all felt so different, superficial and hard,” she said. “I felt like there was a bigger purpose out there for me. It’s in the small things that we find the big things.”
She started by painting folk art-inspired invitations for a friend’s baby shower. She painted delicate flowers, oranges and leaves on glass, leather and even lampshades. She created a logo. “I was just trying to say yes to things that were really scary,” she said. “Laith gave me the courage to do that.”
Her first son, she said, became “a catalyst for painting.” Then, at the first Thanksgiving during the COVID-19 pandemic when people could gather again, she had a light-bulb moment. “I was setting the table and didn’t have flowers or anything to add to decorate, so I thought, ‘I have these candles. I’m going to paint them and make them fancy,’ “ she said.
Her guests were impressed. As time went on, painting taper candles helped her find joy again, and others noticed too. “The one thing I hear when people pick up a pair of my candles is, ‘This makes me so happy. It makes me feel like there’s life here,’ “ she said. One of the hardest parts of losing a child “is that you’re not just grieving the person, you’re grieving the future you imagined with them,” said Los Angeles-based grief specialist Carla Harvey. “A lifetime of love suddenly has nowhere to go. Creating art doesn’t erase grief, but it can become a way to carry it.”
Saleh created her brand Mystic by Esme in 2021, but it took her some time before she could gather the courage to try to sell them. When she brought a shoebox full of samples to Nickey Kehoe, the LA store agreed to carry her candles. “I was beside myself,” Saleh said. “Her candles were absolutely beautiful, and she had a fantastic spirit that made selling them a no-brainer,” said interior designer Todd Nickey, co-founder of Nickey Kehoe.
Tribune News Service