"It's been 15 months since my dad, out with friends for a normal Sunday cycle, never came home. This can't be an essay detailing how I've overcome my grief - I haven't. This also won't be an essay that helps make sense of the senselessness of losing someone decades before they should have gone. It still makes no sense to me. Instead, I'll write about art. My dad's art. And mine, new though it is."
"My dad was (the past tense still prompts a little spasm in my fingers, the temptation to hit 'backspace' and replace it with 'is') a doctor. He had thousands of patients who adored him, but his work was just a single facet of everything he did. He was an astronomer. A kite-surfer. A chess genius. And an artist. One day, my dad picked up a paintbrush and started teaching himself art, using a bit of YouTube and a lot of trial and error."
"The desire to learn about art started with hoarding my dad's paintings. He had a stack of hundreds of them. My mom and I sat together, choosing our favorites to frame in our homes. I chose his painting of Eilean Donan in Scotland and the Colosseum in Rome, two places I loved visiting. I also chose a beachscape with two silhouette figures that reminded me of my dad and me."
Fifteen months after a sudden cycling death, grief remains unresolved and senseless. The father led a multifaceted life as a doctor, astronomer, kite-surfer, chess player, and self-taught artist who sold prints and showed work in galleries. The daughter and her mother curated hundreds of his paintings, framing favorites tied to shared memories of places and moments. Hoarding those paintings sparked a desire in the daughter to learn to paint despite perceived lack of ability. Picking up a brush became a way to connect with the father and to hold onto fragments of his life and presence.
Read at Business Insider
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