It was good to see some of the relatives and talk about some of the past, present, and future. Now that my father is on his own, it will be good for him to have more contact with my brother in law and my sister so the more they visit, the better, but it's a role I'll never fill. I have no relationship with him. Starting something now would be very difficult in part because of how hard it is to communicate with him. Forging more connections with my maternal family is much more appealing to me, and would be good for our daughter too. I don't know how much we will follow up on that, given the distance.
At the service, I thought it was appropriate that my father referred to my mother as a mystery to him, because I never saw any evidence that he ever tried to understand her or her art, which was a very big part of her life. He doesn't communicate with most people and is not interested in communicating with others, especially where she was concerned. They clearly needed counseling, but it was not something he was willing to do with her.
The fraternal relatives in general have a lack of communication thing going. Those that did talk with me at the service were saying that the only thing you can do in a situation like this is to move on. Let us have our time to express and grieve now, then we will move on.
While at my parent's house this past week, I spent a significant part of that time looking through my mother's art work. For the last thirty years, she has devoted herself almost exclusively to mandalas, circular designs with a repeating pattern around the center. Many of those had spiritual interconnectedness, mothering, or angel themes. Large ones were water colors or silk screen, solid color prints, but smaller ones were hand colored with pencil and she made her own greeting cards in this way. She was never very successful in selling them and discouraged from doing so by my father, who didn't see the point of them.
There were a number of boxes that had never been opened since they moved into that house about eight years ago. A number of these were things my father had never seen, and other than that surprise factor, didn't care what happened to them. There were a few of the ones that hung on the walls for years that he wanted to keep.
One day I found a set of water-color flowers she had done in 1985 and added to in 1992. Because they were different from her other work, she had made up a different name for them. He was upset that he didn't know about these, but apparently didn't pay that much attention. They were "normal", water-color paintings of flowers, some with insects, a different style from her other work. These reflected her other interest: gardening.
One of the saddest parts about her death is that she spent so much of her time on this volume of work and no one will ever see much of it. I was going through a filing cabinet with several drawers of file folders of her designs one day. There were usually a few copies of each design, uncolored, and sometimes a colored version. My sister came in the studio and I told her about my dilemma: if I take the only colored one, no one will know what color scheme the rest of them were supposed to have. She said it didn't matter because no one will ever look at them after me. That was so sad. I pulled out a copy of most of them.
In addition to those black and white copies, I shipped home a few of the large (4ft) water-color pieces and should have taken pictures of the others. I also have a handful of small (15inch) works I found after I shipped those big ones and some books home. I would have liked to take a few of the books that she liked, but other than a few spiritual books with post-its marking pages, no one knows which were her favorites. She had a number of books on healing, as she searched for a cause of her undiagnosed illness and a reason she was sick and tired, until she was sick and tired of being sick and tired and ready to die.
She also had written a number of journals, but I never saw those. My brother in law was tasked by my father to write the eulogy and read it during the service and used those for reference. I asked them to send the journals to me to read through, when they get back. I don't know where those will end up.
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