Remains

The Remains

Lately, my thoughts have been about grief. Not the thoughts that live in the realm of the daily happenings in my life, but the visual thoughts, the ones that make me want to create something.

I recently watched a video that I had made around 15 years ago called Map of My Grief. It wasn’t really a map, but more of an abstract narrative of the days surrounding my mother’s death. One of the repeated images in it was a symbolic reenacted scene of my mother being cut out of her clothes. My dad had found her struggling to breathe early one morning. The EMTs had come, dragged her out of her bed and onto the living room floor.

We shared a two-family house and so I had seen the flashing lights outside and run downstairs. I don’t remember exactly what I saw — for instance, how they got her from her bed to the living room floor — but the image that has stayed with me is of the black clothes that she was wearing. I remember the 6 men rushing to get access to her heart and tearing her clothes off. I don’t know if they used scissors, a knife, or if they just tore the layers of fabric. I don’t remember the sound of the cutting or tearing.

All I really remember, besides the urgency, is the plastic bag they gave me after we had stood around her bed in the hospital later that morning, holding her hand, kissing her forehead, and thinking how impossibly big and strong and still she was.

I took the bag home and put it in the corner of my room and couldn’t bring myself to open it for a year. When I finally did, I saw that it was the shredded remains of her black turtleneck and sweater that had been cut into strips. A lot more than I would have thought necessary — or maybe it’s just my memory.

The video I made years ago, and the 2D/3D artwork I’ve been making this week are an attempt to capture this experience, to process the bottomless hole I can still see through the torn strips of black cloth.