A Portrait of Grief

I know every line on her face. I have watched her for hours, following the creases around her downcast eyes with my dark pencil strokes on the crisp, white paper. At first I did this surreptitiously, glancing at her between each stroke, thinking she would notice and protest. But those eyes look inward now, and she is elsewhere.


There was a time when I couldn't look in her direction without her eyes turning back to me. A time when a simple look was like calling to her, and she was there, where her love could be taken for granted. But now, she sits in her world and I in mine, watching and sketching. This is my mother. I am capturing the lines of her face on paper. These lines are my way of keeping her close, tethered to the here and now. They are a map of her, they show where she has been, even as she is wandering away from us.

I've looked at every shape and contour on her skin so closely that I've found things I'd never seen before. But, it's not the right time to ask her about these, she's not interested in conversation any more. My sister thinks it's lack of interest, that her mind hasn't been engaged since my father passed away. But I can see the memory of my father written over my mother's face. I say she is listening to conversations inside her head, those she had with him in the lifetime they spent together. She is so deep inside those memories that she cannot hear our voices calling her back to us. So I sit with her and sketch.

I draw furiously around her delicate and pale face. My pencil lead disappears, used up and spent on the black that engulfs her body. She looks so fragile in her widow's weeds.

In the centre of the black whirlwind I've drawn, I see my own future. The face at its centre is my mother's face tempered with my father's memory. Her distant eyes send a warning to me, showing me what she can't say. I want her to stay here with me, not to wander away from me, but I could be lost too, if I chose to follow her.

L. Jay