Crafts by Chris

Life, death and art, has been on my mind and explains my recent absence. I’ve started this post multiple times over the past few days, but I just sit here staring at the screen and cry. Last fall, I mentioned that my step-dad’s cancer had returned and was terminal. He started going downhill rapidly a couple weeks ago and passed away peacefully at home on April 1st.

A little over a week before he passed, I spent the evening with him while my mom went out to eat with friends. After beating me at solving the Wheel of Fortune puzzles (their favorite pastime), we talked. He told me that he knew he was dying and that he was ok with it. He was very accepting of the whole thing from the beginning. Never did he say, “Why me?”. I hope that when my time comes that I handle it as well as he did. Truthfully, I hope that I drop dead in my tracks and never see it coming.

Yesterday, on my way out to help my mom write thank you notes, I had to swing by the funeral home and pick up his ashes. The lid for the container mom picked out was missing, so we were waiting for the lid to come in the mail. Anyway, with the ashes sitting on the seat next to me, I remembered the conversation they had about whether he wanted to be cremated or not. He said that she could just burn him in the burning barrel out back. He was ALWAYS joking. The conversation continued as to whether to scatter the ashes or bury them and my mom makes a comment that whether they were buried or not she would want a headstone to say that she had been here.

Art is like a headstone. I had never really thought about it this way, but art is a marker that says that we were here, that we existed, it is a part of us that will still be here long after we are gone.