My son Eli died unexpectedly in August of 2023 at the age of 32. He was burly, strong and handsome. He was funny and impulsive, and he was sensitive. He tried to act tough, and he went to great lengths to conceal his kind and hurting heart. Yet he would give friends the shirt off his back. His long wrestle with mental health and substance addiction eventually overcame him. I miss him every day, even as I struggle to hold him in my memory.
Eli loved tools and electronics. He wanted to become an electrician and once told me he wanted to work for the power company. I liked to imagine him going into areas that had lost power after storms or disasters and helping people. Maintaining a hopeful vision of his potential for achieving a functional future where he could make a positive contribution in the world kept me going through our decades of struggle. So this was one bit of so much of his potential never to be realized.
Eli left little mark in the world. I have tried, through my artwork, to represent the complexity of our relationship and my feelings about him and about his potential and his death.
This image came to me in a dream, so clear and strong that I never lost sight of it once I woke up. Surprisingly, I found almost the exact image online, and was able to use it as inspiration for this quilt. The pictorial approach used in this quilt is pretty far out of my wheelhouse…so it took a long time to figure it out to make it technically and to complete it, emotionally. But it is one of the most meaningful pieces I’ve made.
Over the past few years of Eli’s life, we tried to stay connected, but we had less and less of him. This quilt, in which he is climbing into the blue and in which one can’t see his face, captures my complicated grief. In the blue of the sky these words, adapted from a song sung by Alison Kraus, are quilted:
Future like a promise…
You’re a city of gold…
Stubborn in your bones and loving in your soul…
I won’t pretend that it’s not killing me
Watching you climb away slow
Commercial cottons, canvas, tulle, mesh, rope, dupioni silk, Inktense dye pencil
Pieced, appliqued, couched
