Fine Art

Statement on Loss

The following has nothing to do with the sculpture, yet it has everything to do with it.

My father was 70 years old, my mother was 72 when they each died. I am forever altered in ways so numerous, I cannot begin to describe them here.

Like many only daughters, my father called me, “Princess,” and I was his princess. I adored this fallible man who as a child I thought was the strongest man there was. My mother once said that if there were only one seat left on a lifeboat, and her or me from which he had to choose, she knew she was going down with the ship. My father was my emotional caregiver, the one who read everything I wrote, appreciated every detail to which I attended, came to every school-sponsored event, and walked me down the aisle to marry a man who promised to elevate me to the status of, “Queen.”

My mother sought to keep me safe, unhurt from all the bumps and bruises that life brings. She sewed Barbie clothes and Halloween costumes, packed my lunch all through high school with little notes included and faces drawn on my hard boiled eggs. She instilled a lifelong love of reading and of learning, and finished her college degree while raising three small children. She had a sense of humor and a ready laugh. In my teens, my mother and I had a more tenuous relationship. Eventually, we recognized within each other a strong, independent female. With age and maturity, came mutual respect.

I find myself quantifying or dating things in terms of, “Before my father died,” or “After my mother died.” When my father got sick, I qualified that by stating, “Before Daddy had pneumonia,” or “Before Daddy was in the hospital this time, the next time, the last time…” I now tell people who ask, that my parents raced each other to the finish line. I don’t know who won; I do, however, know we all lost.

I miss them daily, think of things I want to ask them or to tell them. For a long time, I was consumed by the loss, the grief left unchecked, unprocessed. The hole their collective absence has left is so large, so deep, I don’t know how to fill it.

As a child, I never moved. The first house I remember is the house my parents owned until their deaths. The sculpture before you, constructed using the windows from my childhood home, represents their life, their death, and the resounding emptiness left as a result.