The Roots of Pain
I called this picture “the roots of pain” because of an emotional, draining weekend. I experienced this recently, and justified it because of the weather. As many of you know I live in California, Southern California to be exact, where it is supposed to be sunny, but this year it has been quite rainy, and the long overcast conditions got over on me.
You may know my daughter was buried last year. A wife and I visited the cemetery both on Thursday and Saturday, and the sky was overcast and dreary both days. On Thursday there was someone being memorialized at her feet. Now the strip in the cemetery was once a road, and so they’re now planting recently deceased people up and down this road. So all of the plots have either a headstone or a little plaque for where the headstone will go.
I was thinking as I was working on this piece about how I felt, standing there with all these folks who have died, many who have died from cancer and other diseases or were taken through acts of stupidity like my daughter. And around us them are these old trees, with the roots reaching down holding them up, keep themselves alive, and I thought of the irony of the situation. I mean this is my daughter, and she should be springing up not buried.
So near my daughter’s location are these 4 oak tree with these huge root systems reaching down into this pathway where all these people are now being buried. There you see squirrels scrambling around looking for nuts. They live in those trees, and they are part of nature, but these coffins are crowding the roots of these trees in such a perverse, unnatural way.
So at this moment of my weekend an emotional oppressiveness passed through me, and I was later working on this piece, I created that line stretching across the painting’s length, representing the slice through my soul. It looks kind of like a razor to me, but the idea was it slicing or the living from the dead.
The woman with the hat represents my daughter; it looks like she’s speaking, yelling more likely. Her head full of ideas, color and expressiveness. But then I realized, she’s dead so she can’t be speaking. I’m the one speaking. I’m groping for her voice and her ideas and her expressiveness, even the drama she revilled in.
Yet my thoughts are earthbound, as my soul envelops the emptiness of my heart looking for that space to be filled again. But I am remiss in forgetting that life has a future, and endlessness, an eternity to be experienced, when the physical returns to the dust, and the spiritual is completely set free. So after all it is her spirit I miss, not her body, not her flesh and bones. It’s like as human beings were bifurcated in our thinking: but the true life is what’s on the other side. What we have here is just the roots of pain, and those are the things we will rejoice over leaving behind.
Works of P B White 