Honoring Our Ghosts
Death is like painting rather than like sculpture, because it’s seen from only one side.
—Peter Schjeldahl
Annunciation…
The syllables follow along the curb, echo from the sidewalks and tumble past like the mid-autumn leaves: An-nun-ci-a-tion… Behind me, outside the Art Institute of Chicago, the iconic lions stand guard over Michigan Avenue. Their grace and beauty fade as I walk down Adams Street, as does my memory of Monet, O’Keefe, and Van Gogh, those artists whose paintings attract so many visitors and did so long before Valerie arrived to begin graduate school.
But let’s step back a few hours…
I’ve ended class early and walk to the museum for two reasons: 1) a need for balance after an unusually long and busy weekend of socializing; and 2) to visit Valerie’s favorite painting, an eight- by ten-foot canvas in what I think of as Mark Rothko’s trademark style: large fields of color, in this case the pairing of orange over a short but wide rectangle of yellow.
Leaving the corridor of antiquities from India and Southeast Asia, I turn right and climb the flight of marble stairs. A brief stop renews my irritation that Hopper’s Nighthawks is framed under glass, and then I head toward the new—well, new-ish—Modern Wing. All the while I’m searching the walls because my memory says Rothko’s canvas has hung in several locations, plus I'm embarrassed by this uncertainty: is Rothko’s art “modern” or, like that of Edward Hopper, might his work fall under “Arts of the Americas” and be on display with the paintings of some who are clearly Rothko’s peers?
And perhaps you’ve heard this joke, which comes to mind after my umpteenth gallery:
How do you make God laugh?
…Tell him your plans.
The official record lists Valerie’s death at 3:58 AM, though no one can say for sure when she took her final breath. Revisiting what’s known of her last hours, I find it both obvious and especially difficult to acknowledge that Valerie died in our bed alone. And a thousand miles away, no intuition or burst of panic woke me in the room Valerie and I shared before she flew home. Had I been in Chicago, I might’ve said Valerie’s name or attempted some words of reassurance, but instead I slept in North Carolina, continued to sleep and without the “sense of knowing” popular in movies and television. That scene never arrived, not even in the moments before the phone call, which came as the paramedics were already trying, in vain, to restart Valerie’s heart.
What were those moments like for her? Did she cry out when the pain became more awful or did that suffering, as some have assumed, subside long enough so Valerie could “slip peacefully” and—just maybe—awake from the long dream of this life?
I’m not convinced one way or the other, but I mostly imagine the former…
The next evening, after the tornado sirens growled and a massive storm whipped through Chicagoland and into Indiana, the kids and I arrived home. Eventually, I made my way upstairs and stepped across the threshold into our bedroom. I sometimes wonder what allowed me to enter, without hesitation and without crumbling, the space where Valerie died. True, the room seemed almost “normal” with the same, neatly made bed and the same pictures on the same walls. I was also in the earliest stages of shock and can point even now to the feeling—one I expect for years to come—that Valerie might appear at any moment.
There was, inevitably, one important detail that betrayed the room: Valerie’s necklace, bracelets, and wedding ring—roughly the shape of an overturned nest—piled on the corner of my nightstand.
Before Valerie died, we shared with our close friends and family the plan: a “mask fitting” scheduled for August 11th (Valerie’s 42nd birthday) followed by radiation and, a week later, the beginning of chemotherapy. But then Valerie died and two years have passed and now my little design at the Art Institute of Chicago, my modest plan to connect with Valerie—like an echo from long ago—has sputtered. Gallery after gallery after gallery, wall after wall after wall. At this point in the story, I finally think to open the browser on my phone and confirm what I already suspect:
Untitled (Painting), 1953/54… Mark Rothko… “Currently Off View.”
“Of course,” I whisper to myself. And while I’m disappointed, I also know that an hour in a museum is not part of a weekly or monthly routine (at least not for me) and there’s still a chance to slow or even anchor the frenzy of the last few days. Besides, I have other favorites like Magritte’s The Banquet which, angled right, you can mirror in the glass of the long case that holds two dozen Joseph Cornell boxes. And it’s then, as I’m turning into the next gallery, that another painting—one I don’t remember seeing before—stops me in my tracks and I let out a short gasp.
Maybe it's the painting’s size, twice my height from the gallery floor, that sets its hook. I recognize in those first seconds a vaguely human form, yet also straddle a middle ground between “seeing” and floating among shapes that shift and blend and remain abstract. I inch closer and the room’s lone security guard falls out of focus. The colors of the painting begin to glimmer like scales of a fish or as though a light shines through a splintered pane of glass. Outward from the painting’s center, marks left by the brush or palette knife elongate and drift into more steady, less erratic shades, tints, and tones.
Stepping back, I locate a sense of buoyancy, what I might even describe as “hopefulness” in the lighter blues, grays, and browns that stretch upward from the middle section. That feeling of wholeness, however, is ultimately fissured—at least for me on this particular October afternoon—in the top third of the painting. And while the museum label (known as a “caption” or “tombstone”) reveals the work is titled “The Annunciation,” I’m too far immersed to see the wings of Gabriel; I find instead the outline of a woman, her back split like the trunk of a tree, strands of auburn hair stretching over each of her separated shoulders.
And then I settle into the lower depths where three cold and dark shapes shorten my breath. They could be stones held forever by gravity or—true enough to this reverie—breasts at the margins of a second woman’s torso. And although I can only imagine this other woman’s face where the blaze of paint begins its ascent, she is no longer a stranger and I am no longer standing inside a museum. Instead of an angel, I trace the tether—the soul, if you prefer—that has let go of the surgeries and trays of pills. Instead of announcing Mary will soon bear a son, the brightness here releases half a decade of suffering, the kind of pain that settles much too long in the body’s marrow. And I glimpse, momentarily, what none of us were there to see: the answer to the wide-open question of what happened when Valerie died.
The problem with imagination, with its myriad and fleeting possibilities, is that the spell will eventually snap. Soon enough I see what the security guard sees: three now four visitors shuffling between paintings, lifting their phones for a better angle, minding the tape that warns us not to get too close. And when I look back at “The Annunciation,” I see again the stones, dropped in the shallows, trailing in their wake the bright swirls of oxygen.
And when I look a final time, despite knowing better, I see paint layered over paint on a canvas hanging inside a museum.
A few days later, I climb a metal ladder to retrieve Halloween decorations from the attic space of our garage. Before I realize what I’m doing, I’ve opened the first of several boxes containing Valerie’s journals. A loose chronology guides me—Valerie is six years old in the earliest entries—but there are gaps between notebooks and the dates of some overlap. I open the next box and it’s as though I’m back in the museum: instead of galleries, I’m paging through journal after journal, focused now on finding a record of Valerie’s first weeks in Chicago and what, if anything, she wrote about Mark Rothko’s untitled painting.
Might we pin that encounter to a specific square on the calendar? What were her first impressions? Did she fall head over heels at first sight or was it a relationship that grew slowly but steadily into love?
I discover a curiosity or two in my hunt… Midway through September 2004, for instance, Valerie offers a six-and-a-half-page summary—point by point, each labeled “K” and “B”—of the presidential debate between George W. Bush and John Kerry. But then I get warmer: three weeks later, in an entry spanning another half-dozen pages, Valerie briefly mentions the Art Institute: “People just pass through this gallery. No one is interested in Kandinsky.”
And near the end of a notebook labeled “12/2004-1/2005,” Valerie’s handwriting—a combination of print and cursive, all in pencil—stretches over seven pages and begins:
She took a map from the counter and pushed her way up the grand staircase stopping halfway to get her bearing in relation to the map. She decided this was useless, her eyes could not process the print and arrows and diagrams. Boxes with numbers and names of rich contributors. She folded the map in half, shoving it into her pocket. She entered the gallery at the top of the stairs.
On the following page, Valerie seems to start again, only now the woman has just recently arrived in Chicago and walks to the museum on her lunch break from a job involving lots of meetings and paperwork. And on the next page Valerie seems to start again: She could feel the color dancing in her ears…
I’m confused by the sequence until I realize that this long entry actually begins on the last page of her notebook (“Closer she walked into the sea of tangerine”) and continues on each preceding page. These are not separate beginnings but a continuous narrative that traces the inner becoming outward, the emotional becoming physical: arousal into rapture as the woman is enveloped by the color of the canvas. The energy and rhythm of Valerie’s writing reaffirm the woman’s ecstasy and here, in what I thought was Valerie’s first attempt, is the concluding passage:
…moments of floating and flipping and twirling on and on in the eternity of orange, when every fiber of her body was saturated and vibrating with the hue. She had realized for the first time in her life the intensity of pleasure with her heart beating orange and her lungs ceasing to breathe. She felt what it was to be alive, a vitality she'd never encountered in her mundane life, a vitality that in the tangible world she was yet to see.
And beneath these sentences, Valerie offers the clue and confirmation I’ve been looking for.
I suppose there are any number of “tricks” writers use to put a first-hand experience at “arm’s length,” to create a little distance from our own lives and, in some cases, to get us closer to vulnerability and truth. We might, as example, take the perspective of someone who witnessed the events we experienced or pretend to know the thoughts and feelings of all who were there. Or perhaps we replace ourselves—that inescapable center of the stories we tell—with a fictional “he,” “she,” or “they.”
And why not: we are not the people we were five years ago—maybe you’re different from the “you” of five days ago—and sometimes we’re different people in the same breath. And so it isn’t much of a stretch to assume that Valerie is simultaneously the woman depicted in her journal as well as herself: new to Chicago, leaving behind the daily, ordinary din of the world to pursue a love affair with art, letting it fill every fiber of her body. Valerie might use her journals to set goals, express frustrations, or examine the back-and-forth exchanges of a presidential debate; here, however, she offers a thin veil of fiction to convey her own rapture in front of Rothko’s painting: she is the unnamed woman who feels what it is to be alive.
Mark Rothko died in February 1970, eight years before Valerie was born. And yet I’m confident they met—one artist responding to the depths of another—some thirty-five years later. And if we put any faith in the power of stories, then it’s possible for a widowed husband to find that record, respond similarly, and share the spark of their first encounter here, with you. He does so because he wants you to believe—he wants to believe—that absence can indeed return. He wants language to prove that the invisible can indeed be seen… He thinks of his wife as a daughter and the young ballerina he never met. He sees her as the aspiring novelist and the mother who birthed two children. And now he finds her sitting alone, filling the last pages of a notebook in the gallery of a museum: new to Chicago, swimming in a sea of orange, rising through the light.
I couldn't stop reading. A heartfelt piece. Thank you for sharing, Michael.
Thanks for this, Michael. So lovely.