I’ve never had a problem with ghosts. It’s the living that scare me. I always feel delighted when one of my dead friends visit in my dreams. That’s what I was thinking of when I made this drawing back in 2012, when I was making the transition from working in fabric to drawing and painting.
I stopped working in fabric because my hands had gotten too weak to do the kind of sculptural work I wanted. I had done a sculpture of a woman and her ghost sister a year before. I wanted to create something that showed how the love between us never really leaves us.
I enjoyed Halloween most of my life, it seems a festive way to deal with all that frightens us. (Although it also brings to the surface our massive prejudice against prejudice against people with scars and physical anomalies, as well as an ongoing fear of older women and wrinkles. Sigh.)
My feelings about Halloween became more complicated after my younger brother died in 2008. He died in October but wasn’t found until weeks later. I usually get somewhat depressed in the fall, but afterwards, I knew to prepare for the season of mourning, and I identified more with the Day of the Dead than Halloween. As the years have gone by, both seem like valid human ways of dealing with the coming dark winter and our sense of mortality.
I like skeletons, not because they frighten me, but because bones are so strong. They carry us all our lives, then can exist for thousands of years. I love this quote from the illustrated book Georgia’s Bones by Jen Bryant:
“In the desert, she picked up the bones
of animals – of cows and horses, pigs and sheep –
put them in a sack and took them home.
She cleaned them one by one, then held them up to the sun.
They gleamed with a white light, pure and bright,
like the sliver of moon
that crept over the mountains at night
and hung there, a perfect curve, like a rib,
over the sleeping desert.
She didn’t know why they pleased her so.
Perhaps it was the quiet way
they did their work – the years of being invisible,
and then, when everything fell away,
they appeared, pure and beautiful.
Sometimes she would look at her own hand
and imagine the bones inside
doing their important work –
holding everything together.”
I often dream of my brother and he is always happier than he was in life. Same with other loved ones who had difficult lives. I know this is magical thinking, and I don’t really care. The human brain is remarkable in it’s ability to recast stories, sometimes in terrible ways, but if I put some effort in it, I can recast them in a more wonderous and kind way. It doesn’t stop grief, but it get me through it. And sometimes it makes me quite happy.
I have a kernel of an idea for a new painting on the transitions we make in life, and our relationship with those who have died ahead of us. It’s something I’ve been meditating on since I created this painting:
“We will understand it better, by and by.”
Happy Halloween.
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