WHAT REMAINS: WHEN BONE BECOMES RIVER, WHEN BONE BECOMES SKY
- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
I began these two sister paintings nearly a decade ago and set them aside, waiting for a day I could not yet see. For years, I wondered why they remained unfinished….but now I understand. As artists, we know a lifetime of experience pours into the painting before us—everything we’ve lived narrowing into the tip of the brush, asking to be made visible. And sometimes, it takes time to understand what wants to come through. For me, these past ten years have been a study in death and grief—and therefore, a deepening sense of life itself.
Over this time, I walked through the slow loss of my mother. After a traumatic brain injury, she experienced a series of mini-strokes that gradually took more from her—year by year, then more quickly toward the end. I was blessed to spend so much time with her over those years, and especially in the last two, when I was with her almost entirely in Thailand. As her words and voice faded, we entered another language—of touch, presence, and breath.
I sat with her late into the night, holding her hand as she fell asleep, keeping vigil in the quiet of the hospital. Each night, I kissed her forehead and breathed in her scent—just as she had done for me as a child—and wondered if it would be the last time. It became a tender paradox—to love so deeply a body that was leaving. I witnessed what happens as the body dies: the loss of function, the grief, the pain, the stark realities. Eventually, she could no longer sit upright, speak, or eat on her own. And yet—there was always awareness. She knew us. She loved us. She was still completely whole and with us.
Even in the loss of so much, there was dignity. And I came to understand how sacred it is that we uphold that dignity—for in the end, it is what remains. The silence between us became vast and sacred. In that space, we entered the great mystery together. As I grieved her losses—and then her death—I began to witness something else. As the physical form faded, something luminous revealed itself. The spirit seemed to shine more brightly as the veil between life and death thinned. Even as my heart broke, I felt that presence—something beyond the body, something that remains unchanged.
It has now been nine months since my mother passed, and for the first time, I opened the urn that holds some of her bones. I hadn’t been able to until now. When I lifted the lid, I expected something heavy—something morbid. Instead, I found something unexpectedly beautiful, almost luminous. Her small bone fragments were interspersed with the dried flowers we had placed among her ashes at the temple—crimson and yellow petals resting beside bones that resembled sun-bleached coral. The delicate, porous lattice of her bones, whitened by heat, mirrored the fragile forms of coral shaped by the ocean. It was as if I were looking at my mother’s remains and an ocean landscape at the same time.
And in that moment, something in me understood. The body returns to the elements. Bone becomes river. Bone becomes sky. The body dies never to be the same again...And yet, something remains. This work is a portal into that deepest of mysteries for each of us—finding that which is temporarily housed in this corporeal reality of this body that is never born and never dies. This work is a portal into that deepest of mysteries for each of us—finding that which, though temporarily housed in the body, is never born and never dies.
