13 Feb Niobe’s Shadow

Painted in 2021, in the wake of being ghosted by. close family members. This painting is about how nice it would be to ‘leave’ for elsewhere, past this perpetual sorrow, shown as some lucky souls taking off on their magic carpets past the cold, craggy cliff face with a waterfall that perpetually spills like tears. This cliff image is from a real place in Turkey (The Weeping Rock on Mount Spil), which is associated with the tragic Greek mother Niobe who lost all of her children and weeps forever. She was later transformed into a stone cliff where she broods over the sorrowful fate sent to her by the gods.

The sudden trap door of the loss of being ghosted was devastating on so many levels. I developed heart palpitations, I had an amnesia attack. I didn’t especially want to live. If my breast cancer returned I decided I wouldn’t seek treatment. I’ve been through a lot in my life, but this was way more than I could handle. I had practice already with the rejection of my older daughter, but ghosted by BOTH of my children? What does this say about me? This called for every fiber of my being to not collapse into despair.

I do, in fact, feel like a ghost. But I’ve noticed there are hundreds of thousands, probably millions of us ghosts on Facebook. What the hell is going on?

An actual ghost does not have agency – but I still do.