Something Creepy With the Eyes

There's an unfinished portrait of my mother in the basement. 

It was given to her when the artist died. I remember the times, when I was a little girl, and we would drive over to the house where he rented a room from an older lady and Mom would sit for the artist. 

There are things I like about it, like the way the artist seems to transport Mom to the woods. The background is trees in a natural setting. They're a little abstract and impressionistic.

There are things I don't. Like the way the artist expresses my mother. I'm not sure he was an actual portrait painter. Her hands are too small for her body and look nothing like her actual hands, which were beautiful, with long, elegant fingers and nails.  

It calls to mind a writing prompt from a Natalie Goldberg writing retreat, My mother's hands . . .  The retreat was in 2017. The cancer was making life difficult for Mom, and she was in quite a bit of pain. I wrote about what it was like to hold her hand, as I often did. I remember letting myself think about her hands after her eventual death. I imagined what it might be like to hold her hands as she died and in the moments after her death. I remember crying by the end of reading that writing.

When Dad died, the only thing I recognized about him in the casket were his hands. He had big, strong, meaty hands. Other than that, there was not much I saw that remotely looked like my dad. It was so startling to me, I let out a tiny scream. But then I looked at his hands, and I knew it was him. I had not been with him when he died.

I'm not sure whose face the artist was thinking of as he painted my mother. It does not look like her, even a little bit, or as she looked when I was little. And the eyes. There's something creepy with the eyes. They remind me of a portrait hanging on the wall in a certain kind of movie. It's as if they are stretching as much as they can, to see something far off to the left. Just out of view. She's not looking at me. And that does not feel like my mother.

I suppose, in all fairness, it must be acknowledged that the artist had not gotten very far and seemed to be saving the face and hands. Death stopped him before he could finish what he had set out to do. Who knows what might be on the canvas if he had continued to live and to work? 

My thoughts are drawn to what might be unfinished as I move through my own life. The things I'm working on. What is in process. What I'm dreaming.

The Green Wilderness is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience. 

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.