The Light of the World: A Memoir

friendship in marriage is its own thing: friendship in a cup of tea, or a glass of wine, or a cappuccino every Sunday morning. Friendship in buying undershirts and underpants. Friendship in picking up a prescription or rescuing the towed car. Friendship in waiting for the phone call after the mammogram. Friendship in toast buttered just so. Friends

Painting was the miracle, the final act of defiance through which I exorcised the pain and reclaimed my sense of place, my moral compass, and my love for life.”

What a profound mystery it is to me, the vibrancy of presence, the realness of it, and then, gone.

To love and live with a painter means marveling at the space between the things they see that you cannot see, that they then make. White canvas, blank walls, his vision.

Something is fading, not the memory of him but the press of memory, the urgency of writing, the closeness of him. He is somewhere in the atmosphere, but also not.

For Rilke, God is the companion, the hand the reader is exhorted to take. Ficre is not my God; neither do I know who God is. But I find this force in art, poems, and the community I have made.

He is man who has drunk his water, his mother would say, which is the best kind of man to marry: one who is experienced in the world, but who is sated, who has had enough, who needs no more than his wife and children and work and home.

Both artists, both soulful, both woman-worshipping monogamists, both aesthetes, both fixers and makers, both uncensored, both un-pretentious, both similarly self-effacing and similarly dramatic, both creatures of the nest, both passionate cooks and eaters.

Each of us made it possible for the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other unsurpassingly.