It’s early morning and the house is still asleep. Outside the sky is clear and I see mountains warming up in the sunlight. Down here in the valley, it’s still freezing—a late spring frost that leaves little chance for the frail flowers of the fruit trees. Surely we’ll have very few plums and pears this year. The apples might be spared, for the apple trees are not in full bloom yet.
I am drawing my father in his coffin. Are there words I can put next to the memory of this experience? Drawing is a speechless activity. Or rather, the place where it takes us is beyond any verbal language, where time was turned inside out, as if on the side of the dead.
My father drew both his parents after they died. For his father, Stanley, he drew a simple portrait with a light pencil on a standard letter paper. It’s a three quarter profile and when I close my eyes I can picture it quite precisely. It’s an image that belongs to my childhood, when we had it hanging on the wall of our kitchen.
Since then, I’ve seen several drawings of fathers, mothers, and loved ones—dead and mourned by the one drawing them. And despite the differences between these “last portraits,” I feel they all have something in common. There is a kind of likeness between them. As if they all belong to the same place and were part of the same old family. The time in which they exist is unlimited.
I follow the line of his nose. It seems smaller than it did. The two black holes of his nostrils attract my gaze and I enter the depth of these tunnels. I press stronger on the pencil. The mouth is loose—falling down, so to speak. One side more than the other. Again, a thin dark line marks the entrance of a cavity that sucks me into its boundless night. The lips are dry, tender, even in their immobility. His famous chin, divided by a line, joins the slope of his large neck.
I know his skin is cold but when drawing him it doesn’t feel so. Its temperature is the one it always was.
Nothing like drawing recalls and keeps the faces of the ones who have left us. It expresses what relates the dead to the ones who stay. It is something there are no words for. Something invisible that only exists within us.
His eyes. Drawing his eyes closed. Of course, closed forever, but for now that doesn’t make such a difference. The fact is I can see those eyes that can’t see. The way the eyelashes rest, curled up, against the skin under the eye, before the ocular cavity. What is more fragile, and therefore lovable, than closed eyes? My hand holding the pencil gently turns around the eyeball, under and over the wrinkled skin. I’m not looking at what’s happening on the paper yet. God damn the drawing! Look at this head and see its life now that it has come to a conclusion. See the way the bones appear more prominently, as if they have won a battle. Now the tissues of the face no longer resist but follow the lines and shapes dictated by the skull. But in this abandon, something of the person previously living is still there.
Between the day my father died and the day we buried him, several of us, family or close friends, visited the chapel where his body was resting. Each of us has a different way of saying goodbye. Some touch, stroke, or kiss. Some don’t. Many say he’s beautiful. Four of us draw him. We know he would have drawn. Just as he did with me in this same place, three and a half years ago, when our Beverly was lying in a similar coffin.
In face of mystery, one can’t always do much. Some might pray, sing or scream, and some don’t. Some try to make a drawing, as a way of acting with what’s happening. Whether it be as terrible and natural as someone dead, it helps to see the beauty that despite all, or thanks to all, exists, because human.
The day has passed. It’s dark now outside. It’s starting to freeze again. The sky is clear with stars.
Image Drawing by Yves Berger, January 2, 2017, charcoal on paper
