The last time I took my mother to the doctor, she brought along one of her many grown-up coloring books she was working on. Her doctor, a gerontologist who is just so, so, wonderful, expected this and started out their appointment by taking the book from my mother's hands and marveling at her colored penciling on the pages. She smiled and raved at how beautiful they were and shared them with the intern joining us while my mother beamed. "Look," the doctor said, "Amazing. This shows that the visual cortex is still intact. Remarkable!" She looked my mother in the eye. "Good job!" She told her. My mother was delighted. And I began to desperately wish there was a refrigerator in the room with us that we could have stuck Mom’s page to with a magnet.
I work as a production graphic artist for a large company. It is part creative, part engineering. I feel safe in this role, I like the rules. My degree is in fine art, but I never really felt comfortable there or really felt like I was hitting the mark. As my father has begun rifling through 50+ years of stuff in boxes to get rid of, and get ready for wherever my parents will live next, I see over and over again how I could feel that way. I just could never be as good an artist as my mother was. And hey, I am not putting myself down. I can do many things well. At one point I could even juggle, so there.

My mother was a fabulous artist. The paintings and drawings and sketches that keep emerging from these buried boxes are fantastic. My childhood smelled like turpentine. She made sure I always had plenty of crayons and markers and I loved when my mother would take me along with her to the artist supply store and I loved how it smelled and I loved to run my fingers through the brush ends at the store, even though I grew up to learn that that was not good for the brushes so I don't molest the brushes anymore. When I was in kindergarten I remember feeling confused because the teacher wanted to evaluate us kids on our ability to color within the lines. But my mother just shrugged and told me "You don't have to color inside the lines."

And she wasn't trained, she could just do it. Her lines and composition and perspective were right on. That was one of the things that started to tip me off that maybe something was wrong. Her art started to get wonky and her sense of perspective got skewed.

Mom loved to paint pictures of barns, and she and Dad loved to go for car rides, so he would drive them around and she would see barns she thought were beautiful and come home and paint them. My friend Pam asked her to paint her a barn, and that was the last one she ever painted. When I go to Pam’s house and see it hanging in her living room I can’t help but notice that the perspective is flat and twisty, and her barn looks like something in a Tim Burton movie.

She could paint, and she could dance, and she could sew, and I don’t really know if she could cook because by the time I was born she didn’t feel like it anymore. But she could make an amazing lemon merengue pie with the most beautiful peaks of merengue that she would tease up with a butter knife into a little grouping of golden curls on top of the pie.

She was amazing. And when we were in the hospital and the big Herman Munster looking neurologist came in with his three young interns, and he started talking too loud to her, and giving her commands to see if she could understand, and eventually gave up, I should have said that. When he asked me “What happened to her?” I should have replied, “She was amazing.” When the three young interns looked at her with pity in their eyes at her black eye and broken nose, speaking nonsense, I should have said, “She was amazing.” But I was too busy trying to write down everything he said so I could report back to my family and I was too busy trying to get the correct spelling of the medicine he wanted to put her on. So I didn’t. And they filed out the door. And I should have opened the door behind them and said to open hallway of the hospital, “She was amazing.”