Paris has a way of making beauty feel almost unbearable.
The same way my breath was taken away two weeks after my husband’s death is now the way my breath is taken away by the complexities of grief, beauty, and wonder.
The permanence and impermanence of life.
I am standing in a city where rebuilding after destruction has been a way of life for centuries. Where the old is preserved and the new is built around it. Where destruction does not necessarily mean erasure.
Maybe that is why Paris gets to me.
Because I am rebuilding too.
My grief is a constant bleed.
Sometimes it’s a hemorrhage. Sometimes it’s a slow leak I’ve learned to live with. Sometimes it forms a scab and I almost forget how vulnerable it still is.
And then something brushes against it.
A memory.
A piece of art.
A f*****g beautiful tree in Paris.
And there is fresh blood again.
I walk through the museum looking at some of the most beautiful, real art I have ever seen.
And what strikes me is how much of it isn’t beautiful at all.
Death.
War.
Bodies.
Credit: Musee d’Orsay Artist: Gustave Dore
A woman holding a child on the ground.
Agony.
Anguish.
Human beings have always made art about suffering.
Standing in front of it, I start thinking about my husband’s death.
I want to remember his death as peaceful.
And it was.
But death is still death.
Looking at the brutality human beings have experienced throughout history makes me suddenly, overwhelmingly grateful for the way Steve left this earth.
He was comfortable.
His family surrounded him.
We were present.
We were all there.
Because death can be horrific.
And somehow, seeing that horror makes me grateful for the tenderness inside ours.
It also reminds me why art matters.
Someone looked directly at human suffering and decided it needed to be remembered.
We must remember.
Because when we forget, we start believing our own lived experience is the whole world.
It isn’t.
People have lost everything before us.
People have buried the people they love.
People have watched their cities burn.
People have survived things they thought would destroy them.
And somehow, human beings keep rebuilding.
Credit: Musee d’Orsay Artist: Henry Levy Sepedon
Then I see a body being carried.
And this one cracks me open.
The tears run down my cheeks.
A human body is being lifted from one world into another.
Darkness below.
Light above.
A figure holds the body gently by the head.
Looking at him.
Holding him.
Almost loving him.
And suddenly I’m not looking at art anymore.
I’m looking for my husband.
This is the moment my grief takes over and I start talking directly to him.
Baby, I hope this is what happened to you.
I hope when you left us, someone carried you.
I hope the darkness became light.
I hope you were held gently.
I hope you weren’t alone.
Baby, I miss you.
I see you everywhere.
I see you in art.
I see you in death.
But mostly, I see you in beauty.
I hear you when the birds sing above my head.
I see you in the trees.
I see you in the sky.
I lie on the ground in a park in Paris looking up at yellow flowers in the trees. Birds are singing around me. People are speaking French.
And all I can think about is you.
I watch lovers lying together in the grass.
Arm in arm.
Hand in hand.
Tangled together.
And I remember us.
Every night we slept tangled together, never wanting to be separate.
Because our greatness together was so much better.
And now I have to figure out how to be great without you.
Credit: Musee d’Orsay Artist: alfred dehodencq l’adieu de roi boabdil a grenade
Another painting stops me.
A man and a horse are looking backward.
The anguish on his face feels familiar.
Because looking backward can be f*****g devastating.
It’s what you didn’t know.
What you missed.
What hindsight lets you see that you couldn’t possibly see while you were living it.
And that is its own kind of agony.
Because you cannot go backward with the information you have now.
You can’t undo it.
You can’t rewrite it.
You can only stand where you are and decide what happens next.
Then comes Romanticism.
Nudes everywhere.
And I think: in the end, aren’t we all just exposed?
Can we just be beautiful and exposed?
Without all the layers we add to make ourselves more attractive, acceptable, interesting, protected?
Maybe that’s why I love tattoos.
They mark us.
They turn pieces of our stories into art.
And maybe that’s also why sometimes I don’t like mine.
Because sometimes I don’t want to represent anything.
Sometimes I just want to be.
A blank canvas.
But life doesn’t really work that way.
We get marked.
By the things we choose.
By the things we don’t choose.
By love.
By death.
By the lives we’ve already lived.
There are things we can’t undo.
There are chapters we don’t get to rewrite.
There are bodies we don’t get back.
There are people we don’t get back.
There is only what we do with what remains.
And then I walk outside.
Back into Paris.
Back into this city that somehow holds agony and beauty in the exact same place.
Inside the museum are centuries of war, death, blood, bodies, love, sex, suffering and beauty.
Outside, life is happening.
People are drinking coffee.
Lovers are lying in the grass.
Flowers are blooming.
Birds are singing.
Buildings that have survived generations stand around me.
Nothing about the beauty erases what happened here.
And nothing about what happened here makes the city less beautiful.
Maybe that’s what I am beginning to understand about rebuilding.
We don’t rebuild by erasing the destruction.
We don’t pretend the thing that happened didn’t happen.
We don’t become a blank canvas again.
We preserve what mattered.
We carry the marks.
We integrate the old with the new.
And somehow, slowly, we build around what remains.
Paris has been doing it for centuries.
And now, so am I.
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