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.

The sorrow of loss

The art and gardening community lost a really wonderful person recently, Bee Smith. I went to her wake yesterday and saw her beautiful garden again, and listened to young and old people tell their favorite Bee stories and their tributes to her strong and loving personality, her talent for getting people to do things. As one young woman said, Bee was mature in all the good ways, yet in all the other ways—and that was also good—she never grew up. I only knew her for a couple of years, but she welcomed me with a big smile to gatherings where I got to know most of my current closest friends. It was painful to see so many of those friends feeling so deeply the pain of this collective yet very personal loss, and I woke up in the middle of the night crying for them and for myself, reflecting on the longness of life and the shortness of our friendships, and remembering how hard it is, every single time, when you lose someone who's important to you.

I try really hard to be philosophical about death, trying to see it as just a part of the Big Picture, and trying to have the knowledge that I will one day die make my life even more rich and purposeful. But that doesn't make the sorrow any less real, or any less important. My logic compels me to believe that if anything in life is important, then everything is. That means that loss and sorrow are in themselves two of the things that we simply must experience in order to become human. I don't feel like I can explain that, or justify it, even to myself, at this point in my life, but I believe that someday—in some lifetime—I will understand enough to be able to.

Late this afternoon something dawned on me about Bee. She was so strong and fearless that you just wanted to lean on her. But what you didn't realize is that all that time you're spending with her, that fierce energy and hunger for life is rubbing off on you. You don't feel it happening—the only thing you know is that being around her, you gradually go from being completely intimidated and at times mildly horrified by her bold decisiveness, to thinking, "Oh yeah, of course we can do that, what a great idea." And now that she's gone on to her next job, you find that she woke up something in you, that you're resonating with a bit of that boldness and independence, with trust in your own ideas. You feel your kinship with all life, including rocks, and feel like everything is going to work out just the way it's supposed to. Bee was the kind of person who could do anything, and everyone who knew her is stronger for it. Everybody needs a Bee in their life at some point. I'm really glad she was in mine.