Good Grief Episode Nine: Art
At the beginning of 2018 I lost my mom to a very brief but brutal fight with lung cancer, she was 57, and no one (no one) saw it coming.
I began journaling my personal experience with grief and eventually turned those journals into a podcast. The following is a transcript of my ninth episode. I hope this is helpful to you because it truly has been for me.
From what I’ve learned, this process can be excruciatingly painful alone, but I think if we take the time to share our stories and lend our ears we can walk away with some Good Grief.
This week’s theme? Art
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Sitting in a hospital waiting room in Salt Lake City Utah at 20, a few weeks into a month’s long tour of the North West with my band, I was suddenly acutely aware of just how impossibly dirty my jeans were. At the time this was an aesthetic I was proud to have achieved — faded, vintage, designer, scummy, but like intentionally so. However, in contrast to the stark Morman-hospital white and teal, I just looked really unsanitary.
Moments later a tattooed young man wearing a surgical mask and about half a tin of pomade in his dyed black and bleached blonde hair greeted us with overwhelming enthusiasm. This was Todd. Probably a few weeks north of 18 living on food stamps and what little income that trickled in from his job selling phone plans out of a kiosk at the mall, Todd was fanatical about my band, and earlier this morning, he had just become a father. We were passing through Utah at the time and it meant everything to him to have us be some of the first people to meet his new human baby, Quin.
To be clear, we didn’t immediately jump at the offer to come, while we were young, we were relatively self-aware and capable of understanding that while Todd may be a fun guy to kill a few hours with before a show, perhaps this was a level of intimacy that should be reserved for people that you have more in common with than musical taste. Todd insisted, no, demanded that we come, and who were we to tell him no. We washed our hands and put on some surgical masks, and followed Todd into his girlfriend Tiff’s hospital room.
Our awkwardness, the feeling of inappropriateness, the fashionable stains on my jeans — all of it was suddenly amplified by the presence of Tiff and Todd’s family, the routineness of the doctors and nurses, the machines, the single-serving apple juice cups — the realness of it all. Tiff’s ironic strip mall tattoos on her thick pregnant-lady arms popped perfectly against the pink pollywog on her chest — at 18 you couldn’t tell where her baby fat ended and where her child’s began.
Todd immediately asked if I wanted to hold Quinn — a funny question really, because the logical, sort of obvious answer is, well, no. What a terrifying and intense and intimate responsibility, no matter how short. However, it was, of course, a rhetorical question, you cannot say no when someone asks you to hold a baby, it’s more of a cue really letting you know it’s your turn to hold the child, so don’t fuck it up.
So, I held the baby and it went fine. I hadn’t done much baby holding at this point in my life, and it would be a very long time before I did it again. Standing there with the child from two children in my callused hands, the room filled with anxiety and joy and disappointment, and a new human person who will have to endure the pain and triumph of existence and consciousness. The realization that every living person I knew started just like this, impossibly small and fragile, I felt the terrible and conflicting things a young man feels when reintroduced to these munchkins at the turnstiles of mortality.
It was beautiful and tragic and binal — it was visceral
More than 6 million people visit the Mona Lisa every year, about 1.6 million visit Machu Pichu, recently an original Banksy painting titled “Girl with Baloon” sold for $1.4million, when it was sold, a mechanism was triggered within the painting’s frame that immediately began to shred the work. As soon as the auctioneer realized what was happening he remarked: “It appears we just got Banksy’d.” As a result, it’s estimated that painting’s value has actually soared far above what is sold for.
There is within all of us a longing to experience the authentic. To be in the presence of a thing that was once in the presence of genius.
When you first start going to see art, there is this expectation that when you walk into that stark white, silent gallery and stand in close proximity to the work, hands behind your back, something will happen to you. The unrelenting power of this creative force will reach inside of you and hold you and pull some emotion out of you, or hand you insight, and like that, you will be cultured, and intellectual, and worldly.
This is a relationship predicated on the notion that art is something that is done to you and this is a deeply disappointing relationship to have with art. Art is not something that happens to you, art is something you do to yourself in reaction to something that someone else has done (don’t quote me on that, I have not paid nearly enough money to academia to be qualified to define art).
If you were a communications major in college, you likely did not escape your first two years of intro classes without being punished by Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” This essay, originally published in German in 1935, was an attempt by Benjamin (a German Jew living through Nazi Germany) to create a theory of art that attempted to resolve the issues that arose when photography and mass media dissolved and diluted its authenticity, and, in his opinion made art forever married to politics.
He argued that mechanical reproduction helped to liberate art from the bourgeoisie and the confines of its ritualistic production. It allowed art to be enjoyed independent of its context, just because, well, it was something nice to look at. Not merely because you were wealthy or elite enough to be in the presence of it.
However, in his opinion, the original work is still special for its aura, its unique place in time and space, it being the physical work of the master artist.
And as time has gone on Benjamin’s argument just becomes so much more interesting and complicated. There are the famous examples; Like when Michelle Duchamp signed a urinal, hung it in a gallery and titled it “Fountain.” He didn’t create the urinal, but he applied an artist’s gaze, he recontextualized it — he made it art, and for that reason, it is not at all important to stand in front of any random urinal, but it is important to stand in front of the one that he signed.
Then there are the more contemporary examples; In 2015 it was discovered that Instagram influencer Josh Ostrovsky (or as you know him) The Fat Jewish had been stealing memes from other, lesser-known accounts and posting them on his own page without attribution. The internet was mad for like a whole day.
Ostrovsky’s defense was in essence that he was the Duchamp memes, a sort of curator of jokes about puppies, white girls, and Eurocreeps in Croatia dancing to EDM on 80 pills of molly. His influence was so big that one could argue, “was it really even a meme if the Fat Jew didn’t repost it?”
This isn’t to say that there is no authentic art, that your post-high school Europe trip to stand hungover ten yards from a Da Vinci painting was all for not. Rather, that art and our relationship with it is complicated.
Things that did not make me cry this year:
Leaving the hospital for the last time.
My mom’s memorial service.
Waking up in her spare room the morning after she passed and realizing that none of the sounds in the house belonged to her.
Not having a mother-son dance at my wedding.
Her birthday.
Things that did make me cry:
The entire city of Guerneville California.
Thinking about removing every bottle of cough syrup and every Halls wrapper before my stepdad came home from the hospital the day before she died.
Trying to find a parking space at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Ca. last week.
The day Anthony Bourdain died — cried
The day that my Grandfather died — did not cry.
Sitting at the base of the Blue Whale Replica at the UC Berkeley Lawrence Hall of Science — cried.
Standing at the base of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — did not cry.
Watching Phoebe Bridgers play the song Funeral live — cried.
Listening to Spanish Love Songs cover the same song — cried.
Watching shaky youtube clips captured on someone’s phone of the same song — cried.
When my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, when she called me and bravely told me the survival statistics — I waited to feel something. I felt anxious, concerned, but not how I expected to feel — not how I wanted to feel.
In the ICU when I watched her rapidly lose things — like sentences, then words, then letters, like infancy in reverse, wondering if this is the last “f” she is ever going to write — I waited to feel something, I felt sad, worried, frantic, but again not at all how I expected to feel.
Then, the night after my wedding, sitting down for dinner with my wife, in the middle of an apex life moment, I felt what I think could be described as real grief — a sort of insatiable longing for a once ordinary, but now impossible thing.
Grief, like Art, like holidays and like, well just about anything once fun unique and refreshing, has been co-opted by the capitalist machine and sold back to us through mass media as something we should expect to feel in a very specific and universal way. (warning, coming in hot with the Marxist critique). Grief has come to play a role in a familiar narrative, it’s portrayed with distinct and predictable characteristics, and if we don’t feel exactly how we’ve been trained to feel, how we’ve been told we are supposed to feel, we think that there is something really wrong with us.
The truth is, there is nothing wrong with you.
One of my mom’s last wishes was to be turned into a tree. This incredibly straightforward request proved to be a lot more complicated than we had anticipated. If you’ve ever considered this as a means of managing your remains here are your options as of December 2018:
- The Capsula Mundi: The dream child of Italian designers Raoul Bretzel and Anna Citelli, this $500 biodegradable egg-shaped urn provides you with a nutrient-dense base to plant a tree on top of. It’s about 11 inches high and 8 inches wide and it holds about 3.5 liters of remains. It’s intended to be buried about 2.5 feet in the ground and have a small tree planted above it. The group does not provide a location, a tree or any kind of service.
- A Better Place: Nestled against the dramatic north coast of California about 3 hours outside of San Francisco there is a protected forest at the edge of a small old cannabis growing community called Point Arena. The forest is filled with Redwoods, Firs, and Tanoaks, hundreds of years old, and for a few thousand dollars you can have your cremated remains mixed with nutrient-rich soil and buried at the base of one of these giants. The idea is that your remains will be absorbed into the tree.
A few things to note:
- It’s pretty damn hard to find a place to legally bury human remains outside of a cemetery. Spreading ash is not really an issue, and of course, you can illegally do whatever the hell you want so long as you’re willing to accept the legal ramifications and/or can deal with the fact that nothing is protected and someone could build a Starbucks at your gravesite at any time (but then again, if you have a passion for Pumpkin Spice Lattes, this could work out in your favor).
- Managing remains is fucking expensive. I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. The average cost of a basic traditional mahogany coffin is about $2,000, plus the cost of a plot, headstone, and a small ceremony, you’re looking at $7,000. I don’t know about you, but at this stage in my life, I’d likely need a crowdfunding campaign to afford my own death.
My stepdad and I opted for a Better Place. Mendocino was my mom’s favorite chunk of California coast and from the forest, you can actually see a beach where we spent our first Christmas with my future wife mom and stepdad, what would become our core family unit for the next five years.
This solution was not without complications:
Being a new business in a notoriously slow-moving industry, more than 8 months passed between my mom’s death and when her remains laid to rest. We were given several potential dates, first in early summer, then late summer, then fall and ultimately it ended up happening a few days before Thanksgiving — in between, I got married, my grandfather passed away, I won jiu jitsu tournaments, and grief began to close in tighter on me, really a lot like opposite of how you’d expect to experience mourning — it was growing.
I know I made a joke about crowdfunding earlier, but we actually created a GoFundMe for my mom’s memorial.
I think people need to sort of organize their feelings about tragedy — I think attaching a monetary value to it kind of helps.
My mom’s cremation cost about $2,000.
Her tree in the Better Place Forest cost $2,225
Travel for my stepdad to fly to SF a few times and drive to Mendocino probably ended up at $1000.
My stepdad and I are both atheists. For us, this was an act of loyalty and duty. We were primarily focussed on the very practical aspects of honoring my mom’s wishes. Is this exactly what she would have wanted? How exactly are her remains absorbed by the tree? What tree would she have preferred? How long is too long to wait for this all to be resolved?
While the staff at A Better Place asked us repeatedly if we wanted a ceremony, a reading, some kind of ritual, we insisted that this would be pretty transactional for us. Depositing her to where she belonged, checking the final box on a long list of checked boxes.
Because my grandfather had also just passed, we had arranged for my Grandmother to spread his ashes on their farm in Arkansas at the exact same time.
We watched as the staff from A Better Placed mixed the ashes with soil. They were kind and thoughtful and professional. We all walked to the base of the tree — up the side of a steep hill in deep woods. There was a large hole that had been prepared. They poured the soil and ash into the ground, and then one of them asked if I’d like to spread a handful on top. Up until this point, it all felt abstract, almost like I was a spectator, but as soon as I touched the soil, everything became so visceral.
I thought a lot about that word — “visceral”
It felt like the right thing to described the feeling, it has a certain weight to it, it feels good coming out of your mouth, great mix of consonants and vowels.
The definition of visceral is “of or relating to deep inward feelings rather than to the intellect”
Bypassing your meaning maker and heading directly for the thumper in your chest.
Visceral isn’t really a feeling at all — it’s a way of feeling,
The terror that if I felt this, like really felt this it would maul me, it would ruin me.
The awful relief that there were no more boxes to check, there were no more finish lines to chase, nothing to fill the mom-shaped vacuum in my life.
The realization that this was just the price you paid for your seat at the table and that sucks, and the amount it sucks is the perfect inverse of the amount that it is rad, and that sucks.
That in less than 100 years everyone who mattered to me would likely be dead, and that these trees would likely be alive.
It felt visceral-
Like the difference between holding anyone’s baby and holding Todd’s baby.
Between throwing soil into any hole in the ground and throwing soil onto your mom’s grave.
This has been episode nine of good grief. Thank you so much for listening. I am recording this on New Year’s day 2019 and while I am not one of these people who feels that time and space is somehow organized its infinite complexity to personally inconvenience me for 365 days, this has been a really trying year, and every time I get a message or email from someone who has been touched by this podcast it makes my grinch heart grow.
As always, I’d like to point out that I am not a mental health expert, just a guy talking into a microphone in his bedroom, if you or someone you know is in pain or suffering from depression please seek the help of a professional, or hell, just a friend.
If you have any questions or feedback for me, or you just want to reach out you can find me on Instagram and twitter blakeoftoday or you can just send me an email at blakeoftoday@gmail.com
If you like this podcast, please rate, review and subscribe, or just tell one of your podcasty friends about it.
With that, I’ll leave you with the timeless words of John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, from the song This Year, one of the greatest ballads ever written about the momentary triumph of the disenfranchised over an omnipotent evil, sorry for the hyperbole, I just really like this song:
My broken house behind me
And good things ahead
A girl named Cathy
Wants a little of my time
Six cylinders underneath the hood
Crashing and kicking
Aha! Listen to the engine whine
I am going to make it through this year
If it kills me
