Our Friends | Art over Disease

by | Mar 29, 2011 | Our Friends, Family & Caregivers

A medieval manuscripts care of Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.

I don’t have a photo of Inez but every time I see kelp and seaweed, I look again because of Inez. I had watched her sketching the kelp, holding her pencil like a claw, her art opening despite her arthritic fingers. Her smile was huge, scalloped like the shore despite her brain tumor. She drew the tide scrawls and the texture bumps of the sand with sandpiper footprints between them, footprints like neumes: high, low singing in the sand all over the place.

From under her turquoise straw hat, long whiffs of gray hair, the few left, would sprinkle her face. Her hat shone brighter than the sea until its tightness against her head brought its end. A neglected strand of gray hair had caught around a button of Inez’s red jacket as she leaned over her drawing, her anguished fingers fiddling with the sweep of the seaweed at her feet. In the center of her drawing was a shell, her medallion from the deep. She rapped on her stomach and pointed to her implant of morphine. Her balding head, adolescent almost, warmed with the rise of the sun, pale saffron like her skin. She reached down, rearranging the windswept sand until the burnt orange kelp made an amiable pattern. That would be the border for her painting, her illumination, she explained. Imagine kelp and seaweed rather than acanthus leaves around the edges. Like a medieval heirloom, her illuminated painting, her sea scroll grew out of sand and the glair of egg.

She had fifteen minutes before the tide came in. She needed not only to sketch the kelp, but also to imprint the color in her brain so she could paint it back in the studio. It was the missing border to her illumination; it was the reason she had torn up so many attempts. Inez buttoned the top of her red anorak to concentrate on her sketchpad. The wind tested the stuff of her new woolen cap. Her fingerless gloves covered the paper like a lobster claw across the ocean floor. Inez began to draw.

When the tide pushed us back, Inez showed me the shadow at the base of her fingernails. “Isn’t it leaving?” She had been directing her mind to push out the brain cancer, leaving signs in her dead nails. She visualized it so that it might disappear. The sea absorbed her more and more. It was as if Inez was picking up the pieces of the ocean and trying to put them back together again. She started at the border, the shore and worked her way inward. The ocean like a medieval text has to be read over and over and over, only one text for a lifetime—her sea scroll.

I had only known Inez a year when she lost her voice, her ability to use language; she had aphasia. Her voice drowned in a dead room too far from the ocean. But she could cry with frustration. Her body grew with the tumor, puffed up with morphine and death cells. Her tongue wouldn’t work around her words, but her arthritic hands still grasped the pencil.

In the nursing home, the last drawing on her bed was of leaves and lilies. A dried-up, twisted sycamore leaf the size of a face curled up next to her sketchpad. She found this leaf so far inland. Inez found patterns everywhere: images abound for those who look. I watched her in bed staring at her own increasingly useless, yet still beautifully angled foot. She managed to tell me with a strangled word and gesture that she had let go her anxiety about where she was not–in her own home to die. She studied what was left of life around her in the stale room, stinking of urine and dead irises still in their vase.

I put a seashell to her ear. The continual slap of the heart to shore, wave over wave, beat not yet dead: art, art, art, her fingers sang. As I read her The Rain Stick, it began to rain here in southern California where it rarely rains. I believe Inez went out in the ear of a raindrop, on a grain of sand from a seashell. Art incarnate. In waves of kelp and seaweed, Inez returns.

 


Coral Tree In-home Care provide caregivers, old-fashioned kindness, and neighborly support to older adults who want to live at own home safely, comfortably, and as independently as possible. Since 2010 we’ve helped more than 350 families in Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, Newport Coast, and neighboring Southern California communities live safer, happier lives.

1 Comment

  1. Thank you for the kind remark. Inez was remarkable.

Coral Tree In-home Care provides caregivers, old-fashioned kindness, and neighborly support to older adults who want to live at own home safely, comfortably, and as independently as possible. Since 2010 we’ve helped more than 500 families in Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, Newport Coast, Corona del Mar, and neighboring Southern California communities live safer, happier lives.

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