Still Life
I would have cried a lot and hugged her and forgiven her for not being who I wanted her to be and understood, finally, wordlessly, who she was. But it didn’t work out that way.
Four years after her death, I am still trying to understand her. I don’t know if there’s a link between her life and her disease, but there is one thing I am sure of: She began to lose her self long before the disease made it official. She let go of life, piece by piece, while she was still in the midst of living it. I wish I knew why. Maybe she was buffeted by history, encouraged to live big, then forced to live small. But she shared that experience with an entire generation of women. Were they all as unhappy as my mother? Maybe she chose the wrong spouse and stayed in the marriage for the wrong reasons. Maybe she had the ability to dream but not the ambition to make the dreams come true. Maybe she didn’t understand that to be the author of your own life, you have to keep on writing the book.
I’ve inherited my mother’s paintings. Old Oldie, sitting at a kitchen table holding a bowl looks out over my writing room. There’s an Italian street scene hanging in the family room, a French guy in a beret holding a bottle of wine in the living room, Ponte Vecchio in the upstairs hallway, a domestic still life in the kitchen. I don’t understand my mother. But I do understand her paintings. They are confident, colorful and unafraid.