elizabethlevett

Summer is a time of great beauty. It’s the dream we hold the rest of the year. Summer promises time for beautiful, meaningful things like hiking, like gardening, like making music, like writing. Sometimes summer is not at all what I’d like it to be. Some things you just can’t plan for, like illness or injury. These are the times when you need a storehouse of beauty. You need to stock up. Sometimes beauty is interrupted. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what summer plans you’ve made. I had a summer like that. It was the summer my brother John came to town with his family so John could have surgery to remove a tumor from his brain.

This crisis, like others before, made me think a lot about time and what I should be doing. One summer morning I was drinking coffee in the garden when I saw four or five ducks passing overhead together. They flew perfectly, silently, in formation. A minute or so later another duck came along by himself. He seemed to be flying as fast as he could to catch up with the others and he was honking earnestly, “Wait up, you guys!” I called him the duck that overslept. I’ve kept him in my mind like a note that says, “It’s not too late, but it will be.” John holds me with his eyes and repeats and repeats that you have to do what you really want to, now.

On the morning John died I lit a candle in a little, Catholic-looking, dark-blue glass in front of John’s picture and let it stay lit there all day and into the night. When I sat at the table with my coffee, the mourning dove (who represents my mother) was just outside. She cocked her head over and peered in at me. She wanted to make sure I was okay. Then she wanted to remind me that I have things to do. The morning of John’s memorial among his oaks will always be part of us, like the crazy beauty of John’s paintings, his stories, his performances. (“Five octaves in three languages, or wait, was it three octaves in five languages??”) His life.

We are like the duck that overslept. We have beautiful work to do. It doesn’t matter what it is, but it’s ours and no one else’s. The power of loss is that it shakes us to the core, it reminds us that maybe it’s not too late, but it will be. It makes us strong and resolute because we may have to work harder to press life out through the cracks of our ruins so that beauty can take shape.

(Adapted from “Beauty Interrupted: Portrait of the Artist with a Brain Tumor,” a chapter from Beauty Secrets of the Stars, Elizabeth Levett Fortier, 2nd Ed., SF 2015)