Pieta
The one
word, 'isolation', sums up a lot for me. My husband chose isolation.
It was his way of dealing with his cancer. He was very angry. He didn't
want anybody to know, not his friends, his family or the children, who
were six and nine. For me that was not the way I function. I found ways
of talking with the children about illness and death at bedtime, in
story terms, answering their questions when they felt ready to ask them.
My husband was very strong, very capable, full of life and lived life
to the full. For him his cancer was just another challenge. It was something
to fight, find the best treatment, pay what was necessary, get himself
better and nobody need know. He was someone who really played with life.
He had lots of confidence, very different from me. I find life a struggle.
It struck me at the time and it has struck me since, we are each given
a hand of cards we'd find most difficult to play. This image came from
a dream I had moments before waking. I opened my hand and there was
a butterfly just sitting there. As I opened my hand fully the butterfly
flew away. This happened several months after my husband's death, but
as I woke I knew that the butterfly was really him. I don't know how,
but that was the feeling with the dream. I wanted the butterfly to be
colourful and it's done with very free brush strokes.
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I didn't
really know what to do at first, faced with a blank sheet of paper.
I felt it was an opportunity to mess about with paint, and I found myself
playing with these little images on the wings over the wings and it
was very satisfying. A lot of the symbols on one side are repeated on
the other, with some slight differences. Those two black bottles, one
of them has got the message standing up in it and the other has a puddle
coming out of it. This is linked with the time that my husband came
back from the doctor with a bottle of morphine. It was quite worrying;
he would sit up in bed and swig from it. I rang up the hospital to ask
them about this because I was very shocked. They eventually found out
that the sort of pain he had didn't respond to morphine. The worst thing
is running out of time, hoping for an oasis of calm near the end - wanting
the physical responsibility taken off me to focus on our relationship
and his death. In the last two or three weeks he was having hallucinations.
I think now that he died with a lot of unspoken stuff. He really wanted
to be a grandfather; it is a huge regret not to see the children grow
up.
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There were
regrets about not having enough time together. I felt I was with him
at the end, as he wanted, the nurse on one side and me on the other.
There were still ten minutes left of the workshop and I felt there was
something I needed to say before I left. Sometimes you're having a conversation
with someone and then you find yourself saying something very important
just before you go out. I started doing this long sweeping curve which
really is the incision on my husband's back where they took his lung
out. This involved cutting his vocal cords. Something neither of us
even suspected was that he would have no voice. He was a man who needed
a voice, to be in control. He wouldn't be seen as vulnerable. It was
very frightening to see him with this huge scar sitting up all night
every night. It's also like a train track and these are staples holding
it together. I was shocked: something so huge as having your lung taken
out of your body and all you see on the surface is this neat little
pink line with the two edges of flesh coming together like a couple
of bacon rinds. It is really quite absurd because it all looks so neat,
with neat little staples. My feeling now is that it was so at odds with
my feelings, which weren't neat at all, really spilling over, so stuff
spilled over out of this bottle here. The waves the bottle with the
message is floating on are waves of emotion. The dolphin was not intended
to be a dolphin but it looks like a dolphin.
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There are
kisses on the label of the bottle - I'm taken back to when the children
were tiny putting kisses on cards - a kiss from each of us. Now there
are the three of us like the three kisses, and three kinds of waves.
I am very conscious of there being three of us now. The circles on top
of each other are the children on my shoulders. As I look at it now
I get the feeling of the weight of being a circus acrobat with a couple
of people standing on top of me. And as far as the message in the bottle
goes, I can remember at the time, I just burst into tears when I put
the furled up message with some writing on it in the bottle. I drew
the red pain here - it is unfinished because we didn't have the opportunity
to have a peaceful time at the end. During his cancer and all the way
through it I had no idea what to expect. I just found myself dealing
with whatever happened as it happened. You just do what you can.
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