Oil on canvas, 16”x20”

This is a painting of my mom.

The only memory I have of her is something I believed for years was just a dream I had as a child.

I’m in the back seat of a car parked in our driveway. My mom is lying on the grass in our front yard, surrounded by people trying to wake her. My three-year-old mind is absolutely certain I know the answer. If someone would just hold her eyes open, she’d wake up. I can’t believe no one else realizes this, and I’m frustrated. In the next instant, the scene shifts and I’m kneeling beside her, my little hand holding her eyelid open. She doesn’t wake, and the scene dissolves into confusion.

This image has never left me. I’ve carried it closely through the years.

Decades later, I asked my aunt, “When our grandfather found Mom in the garage, were we sitting in the car in the driveway?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Was she moved to the front yard?”

“Yes.”

Maybe that scene was real after all. Maybe it was a mix of memory and a dream.

When I was three and my sisters were two and five, our mom dropped us off at church daycare and never came back. The staff couldn’t reach my dad, so they called my grandfather. He picked us up, brought us home, and that’s when he discovered my mom’s lifeless body in her running car inside the closed garage. We were with him.

I still wonder how different life might have been if she had lived.

When I asked my older sister if she remembered that day, she told me she recalled coloring at the neighbors’ house, watching the chaos unfold through their window. Our house swarmed with police and EMS, our dad running in and out wearing a gas mask. I don’t know if her memory is accurate, but I’d like to believe it is.

The only other witness, apart from my two-year-old sister who remembers nothing, was my grandfather. He has long since passed away. I’ll never know for certain which parts of that day were a memory and which were a dream.

Sometimes I wonder if the moment my sister described, us coloring at the neighbors’ kitchen table while my world fell apart across the street, was the actual beginning of my art career. To this day, what I love most about painting, and what has never wavered, is the way it lets me retreat into my studio, my own world…shutting out the noise, chaos and sorrow beyond.