Painting a loss

I was in the middle of working on a landscape painting when my brother called to say that our mom, whom I'd just spent a few days visiting in hospice, had passed. Just a week shy of 94 years old, her body had been almost completely disabled by a massive stroke. Later that day as I was standing in front of the canvas again, I wondered what it would look like to see a person's life energy leaving the body and going back to the timelessness of the quantum vacuum, as it's now called. Instantly I saw this beautiful image in my mind, and really wanted to paint it, as symbolic of Mom.

Now I remember those first days after her passing as full of thoughts of her long and purposeful life, our family, and the love between us, not of the pain of her loss. The hours I spent working on it were actually happy—like I was being imprinted with the true nature and beauty of Life, instead of the sadness of physical loss. It became a permanent memory of her, from the point of view of that unknowable, non-physical part of us. When I look back on those first days after she passed, they're full of love, not of pain. I'm very thankful for that.