Friday April 19 I wake to text message that my mother had sent at 12:04 am. It's a picture of my grandmother (her mother) who died 4 years ago today. I wonder if she had been waiting for the stroke of midnight all day, the hours ticking by between returning home from work and that fateful strike of the clock that turned one date into another- from a date with no meaning into an anniversary. I'm up early, planning to make the trek all the way to Lancaster by 9am for our final meeting as a group of strangers turned friends following The Artist's Way course over the past 12 weeks. I've been joining virtually all this time, but our last day calls for a celebration and I am happy to rise an hour earlier, get the kids to school an hour earlier, and listen to the chatter in my skull for an hour while the morning is still cool. After the meeting, I take myself out to lunch. As someone who makes art about death and cemeteries, I was recommended a spot called “The Coffin Bar” months ago, only to discover it a single block away from where I was already parked. The host stand a donated pulpit, Gothic style lit arches framing the beer taps, and dead roses on every table, I could see why my friend thought of me. |
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After ingesting the best tomato soup of my entire life with a side of kimchi fries (genius combination, by the way), I sit and look at the empty chair facing me, wondering what it would be like if my grandmother had come out to lunch with me today. I wonder what small talk we would have made, I wonder if she would have ordered a glass of Chardonnay as she always did, I wonder what she would have worn, what jewelry she would have chosen, what meal she would have ordered. I touch the chunky art nouveau necklace I wore today in her honor- a piece from her collection- and sit with my continued disbelief that she is gone. When I was younger, I photographed the funerals of my extended family members. I wore a camera around my neck at all times, photographing everything and everyone, raised by parents who taught me not to fear death but to celebrate it. Every funeral I'd ever been to had an open casket. We would kneel and pray and touch the dead body, a final goodbye to the carapace of the person we'd known. Since my grandmother died of COVID-`19 in the early days of the pandemic, I was not able to be a part of that ritual. Pregnant, I could not attend the small, masked, funeral, and had to watch it on my cell phone while my children played in the next room. I never got to touch her body. I never got to photograph her, as I had all the others. And because of this, I feel a lack of closure. |
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After my lunch, I went for a walk in the Lancaster cemetery just down the road. Even though my grandmother's body wasn't there, I still felt in communion with the other side. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom and the ground was alive with purple clover. I photographed the broken tombstones, placed my hands in the flowering bed headstones, lush with pink and white phlox. I picked some to press into my journals, found a discarded screenplay against the trash can, and vowed to come back again. I marveled, once again, at how vibrant my living feels when I'm considering death. I realized that I was honoring my own aliveness on this day, in my own way. I was giving myself my own form of closure, not just on this day, but in every cemetery walk I take and every piece of art that I make about it. |
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As I have mentioned in my previous email, I am feeing called to turn this series into a collective experience this year. I'm working some dates out to have Ryan Conroy collaborate on a historic tour of cemeteries in the Phoenixville area, and after visiting the Lancaster cemetery I would love to do a Coffin Bar/Lancaster Cemetery event in either June or July. If you are interested in joining me, please shoot me an email so I can get feedback on dates/times that might work for those who are genuinely interested in being a part of this project. Thank you so much again for following my process in real time through these emails. I can't wait to see how The Cemetery Walks series unfolds this year! |
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