Here & there: On love, death, art

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FEATURE — I love books. I love movies. I love musicals. I love plays. I love science museums and art museums. I love anthropology museums and natural history museums. I love live music. I love the symphony. I love poetry and Netflix and podcasts and short stories. I even kind of love opera. 

Heart on a string in front of blank wall | Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash, St. George News

Or, maybe, a more accurate declaration is that I want to love opera. I want to feel the soprano Italian reverberate through my body and weep at the tragedy. 

One of my favorite movies is Hunt for the Wilderpeople. It is a tender story about rejection, love and redemption. Its young protagonist, a ward of the state who is has bounced from foster home to foster home, learns to write haiku as a therapeutic expression of his anger. And in hopes of redirecting his delinquent behavior. 

In one such haiku, Ricky Baker expressed frustration about a foe in the foster care system: “Kingi you wanker / You arsehole, I hate you heaps / Please die soon, in pain.”

If you laughed just now, you are supposed to. It’s funny.

Ricky’s all poetry, no action. Well, mostly no action. Except for the part of the movie (which is a big part of the movie) when he’s on the lamb with his foster uncle, Hec, and being hunted by a crazy child services worker. 

But back to art, music and museums. I love all these things because they make me feel. They make me wonder. And they make me analyze myself. And the world around me. 

They make me think and rethink important questions. Ricky Baker and his irreverent haiku included. 

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What is love? What is friendship? What is beauty? How do we move forward from suffering? What endures? What do I hope to leave behind? 

I’ve been especially thinking a lot about that last question. And not just because of the art I love. But because of life. Because two of my dearest friends are fighting for their lives.

Both are women of character and strength and light. Both are mothers and lovers and warriors. And both have cancer. 

One finished chemotherapy on Thursday. The doctors think she will win her fight. The other dear friend will not. This will be her last spring. 

She gave our circle of friends the gut-wrenching news last week.

In turn, we filled her living space with paper hearts in hues of pink, purple, blue and lime with messages of love, shared experiences and inside jokes. We filled her kitchen counter with dark chocolate, fuzzy socks, homemade treats and bath soaks. 

In hopes that our love will make a small dent in the pain and loss that is to come. Because what else can we do, except love her and let her know it? 

Shortly after the “heart attack,” I took a mid-morning walk to the Post Office and cued up a Modern Love podcast from March 16 of this year to help me process. It was appropriately entitled, “A mother’s wild, extravagant love.”

The episode was all about a mother who, before she died of cancer, prepared gifts for every childhood birthday and letters for every coming-of-age event, like first menstruation and college graduation, her children would mark without her. 

She left the gifts and letters in two cardboard chests – one for each child – that she’d purchased at Ross for $29.99.

It was beautiful and tender and heavy. I wept the entire walk. 

I have no doubt my dying friend will make her own preparations before she walks through that next doorway. She is German after all and the most practical woman I’ve ever known. 

I know it will probably be different than the mother from the Modern Love podcast. But, nonetheless, it will be filled with wild, extravagant love. And it will probably be shaped by art in some way. Because she loves it all, too. Especially opera. Which is maybe why I’ll keep trying to love it. 

In the meantime, I will channel my inner Ricky Baker and rely on haiku to process my grief: Cancer, you wanker / You arsehole, I hate you heaps / Her love will remain.

Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2022, all rights reserved.

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