Mom’s been in the hospital for a couple of days now. She was admitted one day after her 90th birthday, on the day that I left her to travel back to the west coast. With her kidneys failing, low blood pressure and other troublesome vital signs, my brother and I had lost hope. The nurse told me that toxic levels in her blood had not decreased as they had hoped; doctors told my brother, “She’s in decline.”

This morning I was thinking about death as a tornado or some kind of black hole that enveloped a living essence and sucked it away. Death is like a tornado for the living. Devastated feelings rush in to replace the vacuum left by the dead. Of course no living person knows first hand what it is like to die. One moment a person is living and the next she is not. Life dissipates.

It is easy to portray death in the abstract, as in the paragraph above. It is another matter to portray the death of a particular loved one. There is so much more than the dying of that person. The fabric of one’s life is rented. What does one do with the loose threads? Weaving stories with others in the family may help heal. Coming to terms with unresolved issues may difficult terrain to traverse. Grieving requires time, time to process feelings so that one can properly express the effect of the loved one on one’s own life.

Below is my rendition of death, with my mother being swept up in it.

Swirl
9″x12″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block