Life is Art; We are the Artists

Life would be a beautiful painting if death wasn’t always showing up and pouring turpentine on it.

But every time, we pull out our brushes and we start to fix the smudges. We begin blending the colors back in where they belonged, but it never quite looks the same as it did before, does it?

Sometimes, there’s just a little turpentine… a distant cousin or a friend of a friend of a friend or perhaps even a character in a book or movie (unless it's John Wick's dog, because... come on). Those are generally fairly easy to paint over, and sometimes, you can’t even tell it was there.

There's the mid-level ones... acquaintances, coworkers, pets. These spatter turpentine over a wide area, leaving gaping holes, but eventually, with a lot of work and time, those areas, too, will be covered back over. You'll remember the images beneath, but you can see the new beauty in the spaces you filled.

Then, there’s the huge ones: immediate family, close friends, spouses, children. These make you want to throw the painting away, to give up. You don't think those canvases can be repaired. But, they CAN... it just takes a LOT of time. My Mom’s death poured so much turpentine on my canvas that it was almost blank. I felt like I was starting over. I had my painting from before she passed, and it’s an entirely different painting now. It’s still beautiful, just… different.

And although I’ve gone through a LOT of brushes, and my original Mona Lisa now looks like a blind kindergartener’s stick figure family, here I am, picking up yet another brush…

Because you can’t give up, right? Like, art is subjective, right? What looks like a hot mess to you might be magnificently beautiful to someone else. So, you pick up some new hues… a vibrant crimson, a subtle blue. You splash on some yellow to brighten up the gray, but you won’t shy away from the darker shades because death made you this way.

My Aunt was turquoise. She was peach and violet. She was all the bright, kind colors that make you happy and feel joy. She just had a smile that would make a brush swirl onto a page, brushing away some of the darker parts. She deserves her own spotlight on my canvas, and the turpentine her death has thrown on it has left a nice, wide open space.

And I will explode it with all the opposite colors of my grief, and it will eventually be gorgeous again, because this is my life, and I will make it as beautiful as I can until my own turpentine washes it all away.