A beginning, somehow.

“Lost & Found” December 6, 2020. My very first piece of ink + watercolor art.

We were deep into the pandemic, still waiting on vaccines.

I was fresh in the grief of losing my dad a month before.

We were isolated from family, friends, and childcare.

Our four little boys needed me to take care of them each day while my husband worked from the basement. Virtual second grade and, ugh, virtual kindergarten. A mischievous three-year-old desperate for attention. My 11-month-old baby starting to pull up, cruise, and get into his own trouble. Trying to maintain a cozy, loving, environment for us to nurse the wounds that were left in each of us when we lost this good, good man who had been such a significant figure in each of our lives.

It was without a doubt the hardest season of my life. I’m crying just thinking back on it.

It was so hard. Just— every day was such a challenge, logistically, emotionally.

I’m so thankful and so proud of how good we all were to each other in the weeks following my dad’s death, how tender and nurturing and gentle our home-life felt. In the months of my father’s illness, leading up to his death, it hadn’t always been like that. My children and husband had often been hurt by bumping into the sharp corners of fear and anxiety that I couldn’t contain. There was a lot of apologizing and forgiveness in those months.

But after my dad died— when my fears had been realized— my grief came out of me much softer than my anxiety had. We took good care of each other. I drew my children toward me. We spoke gently. It was a conscious decision. I wanted to honor my good, kind, patient, gentle father with how I treated his son-in-law and grandchildren in our mourning of him. I don’t know how, but it worked. Isolated from our supports, we clung to each other. We were so tender with each other in our grief. It was such a gift. That permeating tenderness felt— still feels, looking back- somehow supernatural.

But still, every day was so hard. My husband was so good to me, taking whatever he could off my plate. Friends were so kind, bringing meals and notes and gifts. What a beautiful thing it is to be cared for in our brokenness. But still, my husband had to go to the basement to work. Still, my children required constant care. I wasn’t afraid to cry in front of them— we often cried together. But there wasn’t a lot of room during the day to attend to my grief. Sometimes I’d sneak away and write a poem or something— I’ve always thought of poems as very efficient, so it felt apt.

And early on in the pandemic, I’d picked up some of my son’s watercolors and would just play— dip a drop of color into a puddle of water on the page and watch it spread. Breathe. Do it again. Over and over— a little something beautiful for myself to get me through an impossible time. If I felt too full of grief and couldn’t get away to write, I would paint, just page after page of colors bleeding into each other. I could do that in the brief snatches of time when the children didn’t need me.

On December 6th, not quite a month since my dad left us, I got the kids in bed and made a different watercolor. Three stripes of color on white instead of my normal full-page. I watched it dry. It looked kind of like a sunrise, I thought. I thought of the song father had chosen for my dance with him at my wedding: “Sunrise, Sunset.”

I wondered if I could add anything to the painting. I got a fine-tip sharpie from the junk drawer. I have always loved to draw but lacked the dexterity or skill to ever create anything I loved. I doodled flowers and grass on top of the green, blue, and pink. When I finished, I just stared at it. I liked the way it looked. My simple drawings in stark black against the gentle colors in the background. It was beautiful to me.

I studied the painting. I thought about my good father, how much he had given to me, what a treasure it was to have been raised by him and my mother. Their profound love for each other, for us. Who my father is, still, in me, my children, my mother, my brothers, my husband, my sisters-in-law, my nieces and nephews— how his having been here still mattered, will always matter, even though he is gone, his capable body now reduced to ashes mingled with the roots of four American red maples, freshly planted in the yards of his wife of nearly fifty years and their three children. He is gone. He is here. He is gone.

Without even knowing what it meant, really, but knowing that it was right, I wrote this on my painting:

So much is lost

So much is found.

Look below

the ground,

the ground.