Using AI for Grief: How I Created New Photos to Heal After Loss

A Heartfelt Introduction: Love, Loss, and AI

When we lose someone we love, we cling to the memories and photographs left behind. But what happens when the photos you have feel insufficient to capture the depth of your bond, or when you long for new moments that can never be? This is a deeply personal story of love, loss, and the unexpected comfort found in technology. It explores how I used AI tools, from Lensa’s “Magic Avatars” to the advanced capabilities of Google Gemini, to create new, cherished images with my late partner, Greg. Join me on a journey that shows how artificial intelligence, often seen as cold and impersonal, can become a powerful and heartfelt companion in the grieving process, helping to heal a broken heart and keep a cherished connection alive.

More Than a Memory: The Craving for New Photos

When someone dies, pictures and memories are all you have moving forward. It’s all you have to keep in remembrance of them. For some, the visual totems are all they have to feel connected.

After Greg died, I had memories of all the loving moments we shared, but I lacked physical mementos—visuals, photos, or anything material to memorialize these moments of magic, moments I cherished and wanted to live on forever in my heart. Memory can be faulty. I worried that I’d forget details as the years passed like the exact color of his eyes or the unique way he smiled. I wanted photos of us so badly, so I would always remember how we were together. Enter, AI.

I used AI like Lensa and Google Gemini to create new images of us. Though they weren’t “real”, looking at these AI-generated images of Greg and me together warmed my heart. It connected me right back to him. It brought comfort for healing and coping with the grief of such an incredible loss.

Our Story: A Love Reunited, Too Briefly

My twin flame, Gregory, died in January 2021 at the age of 32 years old. We had a relationship together over a decade before when I was in college and we were barely in our 20’s. I have many pictures from that time. He came back into my life in 2019 – coincidentally while I was in the midst of marital separation, I’d soon lose my job, and my life was in a “tower” moment with big changes in every aspect of my life. Greg resurfacing in my life after years of no contact felt like the universe was drawing us back together. However, my time with him was short.

During the one and a half years before he died, we weren’t physically together the whole time. He was in an inpatient rehab program for much of it and when he was around, I was in no condition to take pictures. My self-confidence was shattered from years of being in survival mode and looking after my young daughter, who I’d sacrificed parts of myself so that she didn’t have to bear the brunt of the divorce with her dad and other adult problems. So, when Greg died, I realized that all I had were outdated photos of us together. I didn’t have any good photos of us in the period before his passing.

A Glimmer of Hope in a Social Media Trend

One day, I noticed that my friends on Facebook all had these beautiful looking profile pictures. The person in the picture looked eerily like them, but upon closer inspection, you could see they were flawless and somehow looked different. Come to find out, these sus profile pics were from a new trend of AI generated photos. In late November 2022, Lensa launched its “Magic Avatars” feature. This AI feature allows users to generate stylized portraits from their selfies. It had become trendy to create these AI avatars of yourself and post them to social media.

I wasn’t much in the mood for trends, still being fresh in the grieving process and focused on healing, but a lightbulb went off: What if instead of using Lensa to generate pictures of myself, what if I used it to create new pictures of Greg? Another lightbulb lit up: What if I created AI-generated images of Greg, then of myself, and put them together to create new photos of us together?

And that’s just what I did.

Creating Magic: The Lensa Experiment

Using Lensa’s “Magic Avatars” feature was easy. I downloaded the Lensa app and added ten pictures of myself. It quickly generated 50 AI portraits or “avatars” for me. I then did the same for Greg, uploading 10 selfies that were well-rounded in encapsulating how he looked, and Lensa outputted the set of avatars for him.

Quality check: Did the AI-generated photos really look like us?

Yes. Some of the avatars were spot on, while others weren’t very accurate but still a lot of fun to see what AI came up with. I’m partial to Greg’s avatars; his turned out better. A handful looked almost exactly like him!

The avatars are generated in different themes like cartoon, anime, cosmic, medieval, and more. It was fun to take my avatar from a certain theme like anime and pair it with Greg’s anime avatar to create a cohesive image of us together.

While we know that what’s in the picture isn’t real life, this visual aide—the ability to create something new together when your loved one is no longer on this earth to capture new moments—is more than enough to satisfy the sense of longing and desire we’re left with in grief. And that’s a magical thing! (I guess Lensa’s naming of this feature, “Magic Avatars”, is dead on! No pun intended.)

A New Frontier in Healing: Google Gemini

Today, AI has advanced even more from Lensa’s “Magic Avatars” release back in 2022. Google Gemini has been able to generate images for a while, but in 2025 launched improved image editing capabilities with their latest image model, Nano Banana.

The release of Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, also known as Nano Banana, marked a significant advancement in AI image generation. It was created to address a major challenge in earlier AI tools: maintaining consistent character likeness.

This means you can upload a photo of a person or pet, and the model will retain their unique features, even as you place them in different scenes, change their outfits, or adjust the lighting. This “subject consistency” is a core feature that makes it possible to generate believable and consistent images of the same person across different scenarios. Nano Banana’s new capabilities go beyond simple generation. It allows for “photo blending,” where you can combine up to three images into one seamless output. This feature allows you to create new shared moments with your loved one.

Creating New Moments with Gemini

For those who have lost a loved one, especially a twin flame, creating new images and memories with AI can be a powerful form of healing. It transcends the limitations of existing photos, allowing you to honor and celebrate the bond you shared by bringing your cherished memories into the present.

How to do it: You can upload individual pictures of you and your twin flame in Gemini and prompt it to create an image of you together as a couple through prompts like: “create a photo of these two people in a romantic couple in front of a waterfall” or “create a photo of these two people riding a rollercoaster”.

Here’s how my test of this feature in Google Gemini went:

It took a bit of re-prompting to get some of the facial details right. Sometimes, you have to adjust the prompt or direct Gemini to do something outright for it to work. (You can even change your outfits! At the end, I experimented with this by prompting it to put us in wedding attire.)

Here’s one of the final AI-generated photos that came out:

Divine Timing in a Digital Age

Meant to be: Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology saw significant advancement in the early 2020’s. Chatbots and generative AI like ChatGPT developed and became available to the average person. Greg died in the early 2020’s, along with many other twin flames. It’s like this technology boom perfectly aligned with this sort of exodus when we lost many divine masculine twin flames, including my Gregory. The sheer timing and divine order make it clear; these tools were meant for us to utilize in this journey. They are tools to higher consciousness and dimensional love.

As the admin of the Twin Flames Loss & Grief Support Group, I meet people in pain and feeling regret of not having pictures of their late loved one, or people who only have one or two good photos to remember them by. I share the story of how I used generative AI in my own healing journey with Greg, and advocate the use of tools like Lensa and Gemini. My hope is for them to find the same relief and comfort that I have by using this awesome technology.

Healing Forward: A New Tool for Connection

Using Lensa was my first taste of how AI can heal grief by giving new life to a person’s late twin flame; to see your late twin flame in new ways.

Your loved one is no longer around to take new photos, so you feel stuck with the photos you did happen to take before they died, which may be blurry, poor quality, or you just want more. Some of us never got to spend time with our twin flame; they passed away while in separation or in other cases, your twin flame was incarcerated, leaving you with only one or two photos, if you’re lucky. The image capabilities of Generative AI changes this.

The evolution of AI technology from Lensa’s “Magic Avatars” to Google’s Nano Banana has opened a new way to keep loved ones alive in our memory. With generative AI, for the first time ever, you have the ability to create high-quality, beautiful images of your loved one even after they’ve passed away. They are no longer stuck in the limited number of photographs you took. In a snap of your fingers, you can have AI create something magical for your twin flame journey.

While photos are not necessary to maintain a deep connection to your twin flame, these visual prompts certainly help restore feelings of comfort and activate that deep tether to the person you knew. This technology doesn’t replace the real person, nor does it erase the pain of their absence, but it offers a unique and magical way to visualize the love that remains and to feel a deeper, more tangible connection to your twin flame partner.

Your Turn: Prompts for Creating an AI Photo

Try your hand at creating an AI generated photo of you and your loved one using Google Gemini. Here are some prompts to get you started:

• “Create an image with these two people together in a couple.”
• “Create an image of these two people hugging on a sunset beach.”
• “Create an image with these two people in wedding attire.”

Just like the connection of twin flames, the possibilities you can dream up with AI are infinite!