November 2015

A few weeks ago Michael and I went down to the Tacoma Art Museum to see the show ARTAIDSAMERICA (at TAM until January 10, 2016). It is a massive show. I don’t know how many pieces there are; well into the hundreds I imagine. We had not really allowed enough time, I hate to admit, to do them all justice. But two stopped me in my tracks: both were rather drab of color. Certainly it was a colorful and multidimensional show: offensive, funny, touching and beautiful.

Did I stop at these pieces because my mind had been so busy with drabness, trying to see it for what it was; it’s power? To not be pejorative, but appreciative of the colors lumped under that deplorable name: drab?

This piece “Written in Sand” by Karen Finley asked viewers to write the name of someone they lost from AIDS in the gray-brown sand held in this trunk.

I took my finger and in all block capitals wrote R-O-B-E-R-T M-I-L-L-E-R; the name of my best–friend who died in 1992 (strangely the same year this piece was made). It was hard. I had not written his name in years, and though I think of him often especially when I see columbines, I had not really said his name either, not even silently in my mind.

Just writing his name brought tears to my eyes.

But then Finley asked the partakers in this piece to gently erase that name. I can still remember how cool the sand felt on my palm when I laid it over the “R”, and paused. Could I wipe it away? I looked around to see if anyone was watching. And with the gentlest gesture wiped his name out. I sobbed; 23 years after his death, I sobbed…

There were many powerful pieces in this show. One other struck me with a strange fascination. It was this one, “Icarian” by Daniel Goldstein. It is the leather covering of a workout bench from the closed Muscle System in San Francisco’s Castro District. “The leather carries the ghostly imprint of the bodies of thousands of men who used the benches over the years, many of whom had died.” It had the peaceful quality of the Shroud of Turin, at the same time having a Silence-of –the-Lambs creepiness. Real shoulders, heads and backs carved this shocking piece. I am glad Richard Gere loaned it from his private collection

A few short weeks later Michael And I headed back to Wisconsin and on to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for my father’s funeral. There were so many people I am glad to say. And flowers of every shape and color. But it wasn’t until I walked the land he tended for most of his 86 years that the gravity of loss really hit me.

Fall had lost it’s glamour, the sugar maples were naked and their leaves once bright and golden orange had turned a drab brown on the floor of the woods, where as a family we had cut firewood. Where my dad taught me the names of the trees and how to recognize them.

Michael and I walked through the fields where I had picked stones, made hay, and just walked with my parents over the years surveying the trees they planted, looking for deer, admiring the wildflowers. The screaming golden rod had turned a silent silvery-gray, a cheerless low brown. There is something drab about grief and it’s associated feelings: sometimes an overabundance of quiet, sometimes painfully flat. Maybe if it was summer and the fields were blooming, my grief would have taken other shades: a red anger, a blue sorrow, a sickly sallowness.

But there is a wonderful silent drabness to my grief, which no color could convey. It is comfortable on the eyes, and heart. It parallels the end of fall as the colors of summer wash away.

It makes it easy to be sad.

It makes it okay to be sad.