Eva Rose Goetz

In 2023 my paintings became informed by personal loss and collective grieving. As a society we were still recovering from our walk within COVID’s halls. Personally, within a six-month period, Mogi, my dog of thirteen years, died; Mom passed at ninety-five; and a relationship that had scraped along for an inexhaustibly long time finally reached its conclusion.

A couple of months before Mom passed, I had begun a themed project on climate change. Star women and other animal characters had shown up. Paintings were forming, their story portended a tale of reckoning and the impact of climate grief. Mom’s passing stopped everything. Star women patiently waited in the wings as I dealt with the impacts of Mom’s “being” gone. What did that mean? And younger pieces inside wondered, “Where did she go?”

Berta Goetz, my mom, was almost ninety-six when she passed. An unremarkable bout with COVID had weakened her already-compromised heart. Mom was battery-powered, living on electric fumes—a pacemaker placed within her chest nudged and pulsed currents to her fragile, congestive, failing heart. Her last heart checkup with a doctor, who my brother dubbed “The Electrician,” was scheduled several weeks before Mom would pass. Here, Mom was to decide whether to renew the “lifemaker’s” battery. My brother wheeled our weakening Mother’s thinned body into “The Electrician’s” office. Mom, lucid until the end, already knew her deteriorating body might not survive the procedure. One can still die with a pacemaker in place. However, without the pacemaker’s upgrade, a five-year renewal, Mom would pass quickly. She knew this.

I was surprised by how Mom’s death landed within me. I felt unmoored, disassociated, racked by emotions, frozen, and unable to cry. I couldn’t paint. Grief had arrived and needed tending. I thought Mogi, my beautiful Great Pyrenees, who had died several months earlier, would have prepared my heart. Mogi was still with me between veils and shadows. I sensed him. I couldn’t “feel” where Mom had gone.

Mother’s and my relationship was not straightforward—complex at best. I was the firstborn American child to a German Jewish mother and father, the first of four. Both parents had escaped Nazi Germany with their families. During Sabbath dinners on Friday night, my father would intone, “Don’t think what happened in Nazi Germany cannot happen here.”

My goals of success did not match up with my mother’s dreams for me. “Why a painter?” she would ask. Mom, also an artist, who had graduated from the Moore Institute of Art and Design in Philadelphia, would say, “You have more creativity in you than most. You can also write. With writing you’ll make a living.” My mother did see me, yet, she also feared for me. For my mother, money and survival were linked. She had inhaled these “truths” through vapors of escape and relocation into new countries. Her journey had not been a straight shot into the US. There were other landings in between. “Money talks!” was her mantra.

Though my marriage to a functional alcoholic had not lasted, I had given her two beautiful grandchildren. And since we lived in Maine, far away from Texas, her relationship as grandmother was geographically strained. When I would share about lectures I was to give or exhibitions I was to be part of, it was always the same question: “Did you sell anything? Were you paid?”

Feeling all the complexity of our relationship—both great love and great strife held hands here—I stood quaking. And sitting inside my own enough-ness while tethered to grief’s unconscious unfoldings, a narrative emerged; paintings arrived as breadcrumbs and stones leading me through. First horses with figures inside appeared, carrying Mom away to the other side. “Everything dies,” one painting advised. Everyone knows this, yet until it’s our time a bit of denial stands at death’s threshold. Where do we go when we die?

In some paintings I was taken into grief’s forested terrains. Going into this land without charms and protection was foolish. Sometimes alligators would block the entrance into these realms. Grief was too heavy to carry alone. I was given a tiger to travel with. Tiger stood with me, my guide, carried me, allowing entrance. In one painting a figure floated ungrounded while riding along a path through trees hung with bells. The painting sat for weeks. A “grounding line” that I had been fighting to paint finally was added at the bottom of the piece. Tiger and rider could now enter. In this painting a question forms: where does one land end and another begin?

The paintings came as they came. One painting took me to a place where lost parts of self floated, cased within bird skins. I was told by unseen forces: “Sometimes it takes a parent dying for exiled parts to reveal and reintegrate within the system.” For eight months I was grief’s tender attendant. It was all I could do. And sitting within this painting process I began to knit myself back together.

In Judaism there are steps for grieving—permission to pause, permission to go within and to be with. For the first year the mourner’s kaddish is only communally spoken. Prayers cannot begin until there are at least ten people. It is understood that grieving needs holding. We do not pray alone. At the end of this grieving year, a headstone is placed upon the grave. Now it is time to reenter back into life. When we visit the place where our loved one lies, stones are left on the headstone’s rim. And at each death year anniversary a candle of remembrance is lit and the Kaddish is chanted.

Through these rituals we build a new relationship with our loved one. These rituals are not only for the living, they are for the dead as well. For our ancestors, too, need room to settle, travel, and to return. Mourning connects us—stitches us together. Grief tunes us to sentient and unseen connections, to our longing, our suffering, and to our own mortality, our impermanence.

Falling into the unconscious, riding tigers within, helped me integrate Mom’s passing. My deep love for her and the gifts she gave through her strength reside within me. Mysteriously, Mom and I have both been tempered by and altered through her death. Somehow freer, we have learned to allow each other to be.

 

Image at top: Eva Rose Goetz, Hope Rides a Dark Horse, acrylic gouache on board, 24 x 30 in., 2023 (photo: Ben Clay).