A MONA Moment This is a story, a true story about the power of art to heal.
It was one of those obligatory functions, an office party at the home
of one of the practice's managing partners, a physician named Lew and
his wife Theresa. My role was the dutiful spouse, accompanying my wife,
the manager of the clinic. I dressed nicely and braced myself for small
talk.
When we arrived I got to work quickly introducing myself and making pleasant
conversation. Good form can be tiring, and after awhile, I sat down alone
as discreetly as I could at a large round table in the kitchen.
Nearly instantaneously Lew sat down next to me. Our conversation was
stilted and correct until I mentioned that at one time had I worked professionally
with children. Lew began talking about Ben, his child who died when he
was four and a half years old. Ben was Lew and Teresa's first born. His
fate was diagnosed and entirely clear just hours after he was born: he
would die within a few years from a heart which was terminally dysfunctional.
Living with this was Lew's story, unfolding with the predictable weight
of a Greek tragedy: the many hospitalizations around the country, the
innumerable consultations with heart specialists, the operations, and
the especially cruel moments when Ben's condition temporarily improved,
sparking misplaced hope.
In the backwash of shock after Ben's birth, Lew and Teresa were naturally
very anxious about having more children. Happily, two years later, they
gave birth to a girl who was normal and healthy in every way. She was
a blessing to Ben.
There were two things Lew especially remembered about Ben and his daughter,
who was two and a half at the time Ben died. He said that toward the end
of Ben's life, he would find his daughter at Ben's side in the hospital,
holding his hand. For him it is an image continuously generous in its
cleansing, healing refreshment.
The other thing he remembers is that near the end of Ben's life, his
daughter told Ben a joke that made him laugh. Indeed, it was the last
time Ben laughed, and I had the feeling , talking with Lew, that Ben's
laughter was still reverberating in his heart with all the healing power
of music.
He took me to the dining room, to a picture on the wall. It was a mixed
media, a colorful collage of floating images of children fluttering in
the breeze of a happy dream. It had the dreamy energy of Chagall crossed
with the buoyant spirit of Sesame Street. It was the combined work of
students in the elementary school where Lew's wife Teresa was a first
grade teacher, collected and lovingly arrayed in this composition by the
school's artist-in-residence. It was his schoolmates happy, stirring,
whimsical memorial to Ben. I stood there looking at it, wanting to touch
it, to lose myself for a moment in its happy embrace.
"I want to show you one more thing," Lew said, and we walked across the
hall into a small sitting room. We stopped in front of a framed watercolor
on the wall. "Ben painted this not long before he died," Lew explained.
"Do you see the angel?"
I did not see the angel.
What I did see was an abstract series of colored streamers rendered in
a light wash, with the fading richness of pastels. Here was Ben. His delicacy,
his brave fragility, it was all there, collected into this image of color,
of life fading into darkness.
How easily, I thought, how utterly justifiable it could have been for
Ben to slash angry, jagged strokes at that paper. No one would have denied
him the benefit of the doubt; the right to raise an angry fist and shake
it in a rage against his fate. How brave then that this child should leave
us with an image of hope. For there, hovering over this circle of color
and darkness, in the upper right hand corner, was the pink angel: a splotch
of color Ben left us with and which his family has chosen to see as an
angel.
Until now, my image of angels has been that of the gold and gilded type,
elaborate and baroque, hovering staidly in a Renaissance annunciation
scene. I'm dropping baroque angels in favor of, well, pink ones--light,
diaphanous and sheer. Standing there with Lew, reflecting on Ben's angel,
muttering something banal about the therapeutic value of art, it occurred
to me why that angel miraculously appeared to Lew and Teresa in that watercolor.
Of course it's only speculation, but I believe Ben's pink angel is now
part of the family. She is the distant relative who is quietly, lovingly
caring for Ben in Lew and Teresa's absence. She is providing the umbrella
of memory and delight, in the special place "where the heart knoweth",
under which the family gathers to remember Ben when, in the words of poet
Dylan Thomas, "he was young and easy under the apple boughs/About the
lilting house and happy as the grass was green. . . ."
That was my dinner with Lew.
My
Dinner at Lew's
By Ron Roth
Director
Museum of Nebraska Art
