The Earth Gives

I began painting this on June 9, 2021, one year to the day my beloved Patty died.

I had spent many weeks helping to tend to her failing and painful body and meeting her in her moments of acute and tender glorious spirit. In those final days, I sat vigil with her for three nights, intently aware of and following her breathing and the subtle shifts in her breath and color and musculature, following closely this mysterious process of feeling her leaving, slipping further away. 

That final night for seven hours I sat with her, my labored and fearful breath mirroring her own. Those final hours, final moments: face changing, skin changing, where was she? where was she? where was she going? could she hear me? What could I do to help ease her tremendous pain? It was surreal and psychedelic and magical and horrible and beautiful. At the very final moments I made the phone calls and the whole family gathered and sat in a sacred silence around her as she slowly went. In that way, it was a good death. 

I sat to paint on June 9 and this painting came. I had no intention when I started it, no direction. I simply painted. And as the painting progressed and the daisies bloomed within it, I remembered how much she loved daisies and I realized that the painting was for her. And the painting was about how the earth gives us life and then takes it back in a never-ending dance- growing, unfurling, blooming, living, and dying and starting all over again in one circle that never ends.

This happy skull, simultaneously growing up out of the earth and being taken back into it as life it devours it.

It is full of grief and loss and full of tremendous beauty. And it is full of the joy of loving, of living, of laughing, of beauty. - Just like Patty.

Ultimately, for me, this painting is about love. I don’t know what anyone else feels when they look at it, but I just feel love. Patty was the paragon of unconditional love. The love that I felt from her was the sweetest, purest, most joyful love, I’ve ever felt. In her final months and days, every long hour spent at a hospital, every awkward and labored tending to her body’s daily needs, every sleepless minute listening to her breath and just hoping that she could feel that I was there, was also pure love. All of the lifetime of love she heaped on me, I tried to fill her with. In the end, they took her body away, the body that I laid tiny flowers on and around. And all that was left in the room, and in my heart, was the love.