Art and Death: Holding Our Own

I watched this extraordinary documentary with three good friends this week. I had seen this film in a class on Caring for the Grieving last year and I was so moved I had to have my own copy. I tracked it down and made a movie night. It’s not everybody’s idea of a chick flick—but really, in a sense this is the ultimate love story and a heartbreaker that makes you happy to cry a lot.

Holding Our Own is about fabric artist Deidre Scherer who creates  “paintings” from her real life sketches of people who are dying. Her work is extraordinarily beautiful and her craft amazing in the ways she creates super-realism in portraiture using layers of fabric. But the other beauty is her belief in and her philosophy of the role that death plays in life.

The second focus of this film is the Hallowell Chorus in Burlington Vermont. Hallowell is a group of amateur and professional singers who volunteer to sing at deathbeds and in hospitals with people who are near death. Again, no, it doesn’t sound like fun but in fact this is stunning.

Watching this extraordinary film with close friends led us to an intimate conversation about our beliefs in life after death, and what we might like for our funerals and our desires for the way we’d like to experience the end of our lives.

Holding Our Own was produced by Paul Newman and it’s available from Netflix or can be purchased on Amazon. It’s a fabulous intersection of creativity and death—which is to say generation-- or life and death.

Collaboration and Creativity in Marriage

One of those times of intense inspiration. I’m reading the book, “The Cello Suites” by Eric Siblin—who tells a personal story of searching for the suites and their history—the political and musical history of Bach’s cello suites. I also dug out an old DVD of Yo-Yo Ma and Mark Morrison collaborating on the third suite and listening to them I was moved again by the critical factor of ego and no ego. (This is a beautiful film of Ma and Morrison working at one of my favorite and most sacred places: Jacob’s Pillow)

Clearly Yo-Yo Ma had to find an artist of his caliber with whom to create these collaborations. Watching him with Morrison I could see that it had to be between to artists who had the same amount of skill, expertise, gift and ego to make the collaboration work. If one had more or less then they would have buried the other or dominated the creative work.

Maybe this is also true in marriage? Each partner has to have confidence in themselves, a belief in their own creativity, health, passion, ability, intelligence and the ego strength to both hold their ground and cede the ground as needed. Collaboration may be a better word than partnership. Partnership suggests each puts something aside—dies down a little—in order to make the concern work—but collaboration requires strength and humility—the ability to suggest, insist and to step aside and be taught without loss of face or ego.