STELLA

I look a lot like the woman in the portrait above my bed. Dark hair, slender build, sloping nose that cantilevers over parted lips and square teeth: our features are architectural. She sits erect in a sequined wedding gown, beaming with the joy of a new bride. My eyes seek hers, but she evades them, her gaze fixed on some faraway place.

What is her story? I know that by thirty-four years old, she had married and become a mother of two girls, and I know she designed the house that her family now inhabits. I know she was an artist, filling sketchbooks with delicate pencil drawings, from which her daughter spent many childhood hours copying. I know that she thirsted for perfection, no smudge un-scrubbed, no wrinkle unsmoothed. And I know that just five years after she sat for that portrait, she lost her life to a mysterious illness.

No one knows when her symptoms first appeared. Only when intractable fever, rash, and pain gained her admission to the hospital was it clear that illness had cracked her stoic façade. “Her muscles and joints are hurting her, and they hope to find out why,” her mother wrote at the time. “I’m getting very worried.” But her doctors were at a loss for a diagnosis. They suspected Still’s disease, a rare inflammatory disorder. She was prescribed steroids, and she began to recover, returning home a week later.

Recovery was, however, illusory. One night, a month after she left the hospital, she awakened her husband in a fit of breathlessness. A cough that caused no alarm the day before had progressed quickly to severe respiratory distress requiring admission to intensive care and emergent intubation. Fluid seeped into her lungs. Her immune system was failing, and she was suffocating.

Imagining myself at her bedside, I picture a woman very different from the one in the portrait. A halo of tubes and wires radiates from her slender body, loosely veiled in a wrinkled hospital gown. Her lips turn to blue, starved of the breath that passed through them just hours before. Her eyes are closed, her expectant gaze extinguished, and her frame, once so strong, collapses into the tangle of sheets, tubing, and frantic fingertips desperate to save the life obstinately slipping through them. She languishes in chaotic silence as the final beat of her heart strikes her breast and the first tear falls for a spirit too soon departed.

My thoughts turn to her young children. I envision them crawling curiously through an ever thickening forest of dressed-up legs belonging to people familiar and strange whose whispers like wind and tears like rain descend upon their heads as the tempest of loss sets in. I hear their lonesome cries echoing from the walls of the house she built. I marvel at the accomplishment of that house, whose structural integrity defiantly outlasted that of its designer. It would shelter those children in her absence, a womb of beams, bricks, and grit. The labor was long, and the girls were born into adulthood unsmoothed by their mother’s touch.

A mother’s death shapes her daughter’s life. It carves a hole at her core that she spends every day trying to close. She patches it with stoicism and indifference, eschewing the pain in silence. With time, the patches disintegrate, and the wound reopens, scarred but spilling sorrow just as fervently as the day it appeared. She carries on quietly, lips tightened to contain the grief circulating out of her fenestrated heart. She becomes an edifice. Guarded and mute, she nurses her wound alone, fearful that exposure to the elements of judgment and pity would widen it. She thinks the cracked foundation is a structural flaw only her mother’s hand can repair.

She flips through her mother’s sketchbook and pauses on the pages where delicate pencil lines articulate hands with long fingers poised in gentle gestures. She traces those fingers with her own, noticing how alike they are. She picks up a pencil to draw, and she tries to resurrect her mother’s hands with her clumsy scribbles. With time her artistry improves, but years of practice never allow her to grasp her mother’s spirit trapped in the fibers and fabric of parchment and time.

Her hand, empty of a mother’s touch, grows cold, and she extends it to the others in this world that illness and adversity have emptied. It is an act of charity steeped in self-interest, for she hopes that holding their hands will break the numbness in hers. She takes hold, knowing that the union could close the wound her mother’s death had created—or inflame it. She takes the risk, driven to feel, and heal, the heartache of her loss.

My thoughts return to the portrait on the wall of my room. I nod to her, the one I had called mother—before she took her last breath, 25 years ago today.

—LC, 2016