Art-making and the life force (1)
I am proud to have assisted a person who meant a lot to me -- my mother -- come back to life from near-death by making art. In a way, I gave her what she had given me. I've written elsewhere about my mother, the art teacher, and her philosophy of art: Here is a short animated version of that story (thank you, Amy Burvall).
Geraldine Rheingold lived to the age of 99. At the age of 95, we rushed her to emergency surgery that took out most of her colon. The surgeon, a short woman who told us she stood on a box during surgery, told us to get our daughter home from college to say goodbye, because 95 year olds don't often survive the extensive surgery required. I have to interrupt this narrative to explain that my mother was extraordinarily talented at becoming very close to people very quickly. I'm an introvert. She was something that you couldn't quite call an extrovert: she didn't really broadcast; people were drawn to quickly become intimate. I took her with me when I did my grocery shopping, and Gerry liked to sit on the bench outside the market while I shopped. I can't remember a single time when this didn't happen: When I came back outside with my groceries, Gerry was enmeshed in deep conversation with someone she just met. People seemed compelled to tell her their life story.
Back to Gerry facing surgery. Before they wheeled her out, every member of the surgical team came in to introduce themselves: anaesthesiologist, chief surgical nurse. As it happened, they were all women. And I watched as Gerry made a connection with them. It might just have been my projection, but it looked to me like they were all beginning to think she could make it. She did survive, but was on a ventilator in the ICU for a week. She could communicate that she heard me and knew who I was through hand squeezes. When they took her off the ventilator and we moved her to a rehab facility, she couldn't walk, see, talk, or move. The head of the rehab hospital told me it didn't really matter which long-term care facility I chose, because Gerry wouldn't be sentient enough to know the difference.
After a couple weeks, she still wasn't talking. Her vision had been going for some time. But she was able to move an arm and flex the fingers. So I put watercolor paint on a brush, positioned a piece of watercolor paper, and -- telling her what I was doing -- put the brush in her hand and moved it to the paper. I began to move her hand, but quickly felt her beginning to move it on her own volition. I sat back and watched her paint, changing the colors when the brush went dry. And as she painted, I saw the life force beginning to spring out from her deepest wells. This is that painting:
We moved her to a skilled nursing facility. Her eyesight was very blurry, but she could see lines and colors. She was in a wheelchair for the remaining four years of her life. But she regained her fine motor control in her hands, started speaking, and clearly was back in charge of her faculties for a while. We continued to paint. I'd wheel her out to the sun. We'd set up. I would ask her what color she wanted. I'd load the brush and hand it to her. Here are two of her works from that period (the signature is hers):
