A still life, a table covered in a partially blue checkered cloth with blue horizontal bands on which are pears, what looks like a high bowl of plums and a plate of grapes. On the table is a white and blue pitcher ladened with sunflowers. To the right of this is a window with nine vertical panes which overlooks what seems to be a pond or lake. Trees are here but they are not in flower, perhaps it is early spring or late fall. All in all, it is a pleasant print and perhaps it was calming for my daughter, Caryn, when she bought it. She bought it somewhere and that somewhere is forever lost.
When I wake in the morning I look across to the wall and it is there, the print that I retrieved from her apartment in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1998 after she had taken her life.The print is not important. What is important is that Caryn gazed at it, looked at it, took it in or perhaps she paid it no mind after a time. And to Sarah Rishel who printed it, where is she now? Is she alive and creating? Or is she dead? Ms.Rishel, are you aware of the contribution you made to my daughter’s well-being? What is infinitely remarkable is how a print such as this is looked on for many hundreds of times, perhaps thousands, and what does it take in from the eye of its beholders? Or do the eyes of beholders shed something of themselves and give to the print a timeless glance? A print gives and a print takes in. All art is an unconscious exchange, of unknown reciprocity.
- “Can You Imagine” by Sarah Rishel
It gives me pleasure to know that my daughter gazed upon this print and that I have it in my possession. It is but a thing, but things can count tenderly. To touch an artifact of her existence gives me a caress of a kind. So the artist, Caryn and I share something of no real importance except to that meaning we give it. It is much like an archeologist opening up a tomb for the first time and breathing the dank air of centuries past. It is a connection of a kind and the print gives me that reasurrance that my child held it, looked upon it, gave it meaning and intention, drew some pleasure from it for she had little real pleasure in life. Her death and the manner in which she died is ever a gaping wound in my side. When I am gone, she will be gone as well, having perished twice. For it is in active and nourished memory that we keep in thrall those who do mean so much to us.
The things we leave behind say so much about us, directly and indirectly. I will leave books to be read, photographs of relatives to be looked at, perhaps considered, boxes of manuscripts or in the “cloud” to be read if anyone will read them. I will leave things such as a camera, rings, one ring I made for my mother in shop at age 14 or so; my mother’s wedding band as well. I will leave prints that I like as well as a large shell I gave to Rochelle for our anniversary for I did not have the wherewithal to buy anything more than twenty-five dollars. Some things do not come to mind but as my loved ones rummage through my stuff perhaps they will discover other emblematic items that I do not even take cognizance of. I am feeling very sad and touched as I write these words, a sadness that words cannot find expression.
Caryn had no idea that her choice of a print would also be a gift to both of us. It tells me of her taste and her needs. What Caryn never received, if I may draw such an overarching statement, is solace! In this print, not to make too much of it, is a kind of solace, a picture of a calm scene, in no way menacing. My daughter if she were alive would draw out from me a painful expression, for in all my life, I have never found solace. I choose to live, to go on; she chose otherwise, for there are those tenderly fragile souls who just surrender to the dark voices that seduce them into nothingness. There was much terrifying physical pain in her life and terrifying psychological pain as well. As was said of the Holocaust, the better part of humanity died in the camps.
Caryn survives in me.
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