In the summer of 1985, my mother was having chemotherapy. She had been diagnosed as having a form of cancer similar tothe kind people get from asbestos exposure. The doctors had done exploratory surgery and decided that it was inoerable, as it had spread throughout the lining of her abdomen. For almost a year she had been kept relatively comfortable and active with a medicine extracted from the myrtle plant: but her doctor had decided it was time to switch to stronger, more tradtional, heavy metal compounds.
She was in the hospital, attached to a rolling appliance that gave her measured doses of platinum, when I arrived. She would typically spend two or three days there receiving the treatment, and then she would be sent home to recover from it. She slept a lot in the hospital. I was reading a book about Rembrandt at the time, and when she'd wake up, I would tell her what I'd read in the meantime.
At home she was nauseous and exhausted. We spent long afternoons in a living room with big windows and gauze curtains. It was warm and quiet and the lights were off. I made drawings of her asleep and resting on the couch. It had been a long time since I had done that kind of work, so I had a hard time getting started. She didn't look at the drawings, but she knew what I was doing and told my father she'd been 'sketched' while she was sleeping.
I took these pictures of my mother and my father in a small house that once belonged to my Aunt Wilma and Uncle Neil, on 29th Street in Holland, Michigan. They were moving there because their house on 12th Street was too big for them to take care of, and because my mother wanted a manageable home for my father after she was gone.
Before they opened the funeral home for visitations, my father, my brother, my sisters and I were given some time and asked to approve the display of my mother. We all agreed it didn't look like her. 'She looks so stern,' my father said, 'she was a happy person.' He explained to the mortician that I was an artist, and left the two of us to try something. The mortician offered to 'make the lips a little fuler,' and he aplied some color from a tube of her lipstick with a little brush. He looked to me for approval or suggestions, but I could only thank him for his efforts. I couldn't help. I'm not that kind of artist.
I made these drawings of my terminally ill father in Holland Hospital, where I was born. When I arrived he had lost consciousness for the last time, and the only thing I could do was hold his hand and moisten his lips which were cracked and dry because he had refused food or water. He was taken to the hospital less than two days after he moved to an assisted living home.
My father didn't want a viewing. He wanted to be cremated. The funeral director interviewed the family about my father's life and tried to sell us on the idea of an overproduced video with music to be played at the funeral home. We opted against that and they took their rewrite of our notes off their website the next day.
After the service the family went to the gravesite, and watched as two laborers put the wooden box containing dad's ashes in a square hole barely a foot under the ground level. The men cast half a dozen shovelfulls of dirt over the box, and tamped it down with an awkward one-foot-in-the-grave, one-foot-on-the-ground circle around the hole, and laid a square of grass on top of their work. The funeral director watched his workers do their little dance, nodded to the orphaned family and drove away in a black car.
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