Heart Healing Art
Barbara had been a caregiver for 11 years until her mother, Irene, died in late 2021 at age 93. She witnessed Irene’s decline, especially in the last year of her life when she went from a lively presence in a lovely residential community to a shell of a person who couldn’t fasten her bra and yelled, “They’re hurting me, they’re killing me,” when a staff person approached her.
This caregiving experience is not atypical. What makes it particularly poignant is Barbara’s back story and how she found art as a diversion from dual daily stresses—the pandemic and coping with the burdens of caregiving for someone she resented and resisted throughout her life.
When Barbara was six, and her sister, Lisa, was three, their birth mother died during a spinal tap examination. Their father and the young girls went to live with the mother’s grandparents in Harrisburg, PA. It was a very happy time for the two girls.
However, when Barbara was nine, her father, Herb, married Irene, who adopted the girls. Moving away from her grandparents was very traumatic, she recalls. “I would have rather lived with them.”
Herb and Irene were very strict with Barbara and her sister. They could visit the beloved grandparents, but the grandparents were never invited to their home for birthday parties or gatherings.
Barbara and Lisa “had a united front” rebelling against the strictures of the family. “Love is not a word my sister would use (for Irene). Me neither. It still hurts to this day.”
When Barbara was 18, she went away to college. When she was 20, she moved to New York and lived in Yonkers and at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. She married when she was 23 and had three children.
“After I moved out, I only saw my parents once or twice a year. Once I had children of my own, they were more involved and were very good grandparents. And I got along with them fine.”
Fast forward to the pandemic years. Before visits were curtailed, Barbara regularly played canasta with Irene and learned mah-jongg to share Irene’s enjoyment of that game. There were outings and visits with Barbara’s children and grandchildren. But that all changed with COVID.
Throughout 2020 and part of 2021, Barbara occupied herself with a new passion—painting rocks and making cactus rock gardens. She copied ideas/images from the internet and made over 50 different objects for her family and friends—Dr. Seuss and Sesame Street characters, seasonal designs, and her favorites, ladybugs and bumblebees. She always makes two—one for the recipient and one for her collection. She buys pots from the dollar store, spray paints them and paints the rocks to resemble native Southwest cacti.
All this time, Irene’s decline became more and more noticeable. She also developed an aggressive skin cancer above her eyebrow that required weeks of radiation therapy five days a week. That certainly didn’t help.
“She didn’t know me the last two weeks of her life. I felt badly for her.”
At Irene’s burial service, Barbara placed painted ladybug rocks on her grave.
