About Passing: Death's Doorway

Once upon a time I chose to paint the color of white specifically. I intended on doing "white" landscapes, the images of winter. Little knowing where my choice would lead me, I equipped my car with a portable studio in order to paint directly. It was a very cold winter. I shivered between not heating the car and heating it, fearing asphyxiation on some backcountry road. I was discouraged and driven (perhaps led) out of the cold.

At the time, I was lving with my brother and his wife in Maine. She was a nurse at a small nursing home, and she invited me to visit the patients. There, waiting, to my suprise, was a world of white! It was like Christmas morning and something special shimmered. Here were people with lives, memories, humor, dreams, pain, confusion, and hope. In both the emotional and the aesthetic senses, here were expansive landscapes with hundreds of colors of white. But better to me because of the presence of human life. Human life, that even at its end and difficulty is of worth - deep worth. My eyes opened wide.

I asked permission to draw the patients while I visited. I was a little afraid that they would not join me in finding them beautiful. I felt the drawings might cause them pain as a mirror's reflection tells us of time's passing. But I was suprised. Their response to my genuine recognition of their moral beauty was delightful. They were hungry to be cherished. In a sense, we gave ourselves to each other. It almost seems as if an actual transaction took place. I had never done portraiture in school studies, and now I found my pencil and my brush receving them. I was delighted and honestly suprised at what lay on my paper after fifteen or twenty minutes' time of visiting and sketching. My joy over the patients response was just as great. They too were able to see the beauty that still lay in them.

Following this first great success, and seeking support to continue it, I moved my work to a five-hundred bed geriatric mental health facility, where a willing administrator had embraced my project under his department of psychology to help build self esteem in his patients.

Upon entrance, I was overwhelmed by the apparent sameness and by the great numbers. There were five hundred beds, twenty-five beds in each open ward. There were no walls, only curtains, a bedside table and sometimes a a chair at the foot of the bed. At the end of each ward was a solarium. I spent a while just visiting without drawing, to familiarize myself with the hospital and the hospital with me. Each afternoon for a while, I'd return to my studio in a sun porch at the end of a condemned portion of the hospital. I'd sit wondering how and where to begin and what effect one person could possibly have. I found a wonderful old pressed-back kitchen chair, mounted it on casters so that I could roll it easily through the miles of wards, and fitted the back to hold paper, pencils, and water color supplies.

I began. One person at a time. First in the public places, then into the wards and by bedsides. The sameness left. The putrid green walls disappeared, even the urine smell vanished, as each person became someone unique. The whites of their hair, bedding, clothes, and finely stretched skin grew colorful. My eyes became quickly sensitive to the range of colors in this apparently colorless world. I began with pencil drawing, but quickly started using water colors. Lavender, blues, and greens were in the shadows. Honey, rose, and warm biscuit colors shone in the light planes.

Each weekday, all day for a year, I would draw and visit. Because each person was in a differents place in terms of their physical, mental, and emotional health, I would try to meet them there. Sometimes we held conversation in words, sometimes sensible and sometimes from another time and place. Other times, I sang or hummed to them and told them of the lilacs blooming outside.

It was especially in the dying wards that I sang quietly and listened for birds. I spent two weeks in the terminal wards without paper or pencil, just trying to grow less afraid, to draw close enough to touch their hands or cheeks. It was the most personal private experience. This was the whitest of all places, it was the light of standing nearby the threshold that they hovered between. I could not know them very well, nor their destiny. But I could pray and sing songs of comfort, listen to the rain and speak to them of the One who loved them and waited to receive them. I don't know if they could "hear" me, but it was the best that I knew to do.

As I look at each picture, I am there again. I hear the sounds of clashing metal bedpans, the slow squeak of the meal carts, the shuffle of slippered feet and the voices. Mostly I hear voices. The rest is a backdrop that the people are sketched upon. I don't know how, but they are also written on my heart.

As I write this, it has been eighteen years since the one-year residency. Much has changed. There are hospices, gerontology courses and degrees, support groups, research; there are books and books on death, dying, the loss of loved ones, the grief process, and how to say goodbye for everyone from pre-schoolers to adult children of the elderly. Society's awareness has changed greatly. In twelve years I have changed. As much as I believed in the work at the time, the climate was such that I shyly packed the drawings away. I viewed them as a fairly private and personal experience that was awkward to share and somewhat unwelcomed.

Now I have been given this precious opportunity to share. I welcome your responses, your emotions, your thoughts. I hope others will join me in the telling.

This is my story, their story, our story. I call it 'Passing'.

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