And so you live on through your art work from which you toiled over and conceptualized only in your darkest moments. To create such beauty when you were feeling your lowest is amazing. I had such conversations between us about your art work. Many people know your work as: “quiet like thunder” but, don’t know that you shared that name with me one summer day while walking down Oak Street in Daytona. Neither does the family know that you would coincidentally name your “angel” collection as a group with no distinguishable titles–just a collection (it was your usual practice to name each of your art pieces distinctly).
We had conversations about that–but, I never told you how ominous I thought it was that you would choose angels as your subject. “Were they people you’ve known?” I asked. “No, just faces I see” you responded. I thought the entire subject matter you’d chosen to be odd and spent most of our walk in silent contemplation processing the idea of angels. Now, you’re gone and all we have are these art pieces. You and I are unique as brother and sister because we were born 1 day shy of being a year apart. With your birthday preceding mine on the 23rd, now, I must live with your death as a prelude to my own birthday tomorrow. I can’t bring myself to say the usual trite words that most people leave on days such as this.
Before your death your birthday was always a happy reminder and joke between us as the one day in which we were the same age (until the next day when I’d once again be 1 yr older than you). I always looked forward to you asking your over 5K facebook friends to wish me (your sister) Happy Birthday because you knew I only have a few loyal, close family and friends who’d even bother to say Happy birthday to me tomorrow.
Since your death I can’t even bring myself to say, “I miss you.” The words seem so “small” when compared to the depth of our emptiness since you left. On a day like this all I can say is that you were the best brother a sister could have wished for. You were protective, insightful, yet, funny, and, at the same time, so much like your body of art work, “quiet like thunder.”
Today, started out sort of “off-kilter.” I was up making this sour dough multi-grain bread (picture below) and couldn’t find my dough hook to my treasured Kitchen Aid mixer (I still can’t find it). Then, at 3: 20 a.m. this morning, the cable went off due to technical work being done in our area until 10 a.m. Everything just seemed a bit off today. In the end, I had to knead my bread manually and eventually, as soon as I called the cable company and told them I still didn’t have service–the t.v. came on! I guess it was all just as well. It kept me from thinking about missing you so much. So, my posting this copy of your first angel is befitting. She’s looking down, above it all, contemplating the enormity of this universe.
I will close this post with Sonnet #18 by Shakespeare which speaks about art’s perpetuity and the significance of dying before your time: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”.
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