Art and Dying

Art and dying. I’m getting a new angle on it, while keeping vigil for a dying relative in a facility called Hospice Atlanta. The facility is beautiful—like leafing through pages of Southern Living or House and Garden. On every table and beautifully lathed shelf stand porcelain vases, artistic boxes of every imaginable shape, and marble, glass, and bronze statues.

Image by freeparking (Creative Commons)

The walls in each room and hallway are covered in art, some original painting, some reproductions. The full gamut is here: seascapes, landscapes, still life, graphics from the Atlanta Historical Society, and even some abstract canvases, all elegantly framed.

As we wait, taking our turns by the bedside, we prowl the halls, styrofoam cups in hand (coffee generously provided by Starbucks). We gather in hushed dialogues along the halls, the paintings serving as a benevolent stage set.

One administrator explained that placing such vivid art and artifacts ranked high in their aesthetic plan for this center. People, she reminded me, need to be uplifted when everything else is bleak.

In a culture that has forgotten the ability of art to empower, encourage, and restore, it’s refreshing to find this standard expressed so clearly, particularly in a place where everyone is looking into the eyes of death.

The pseudo art of our time that purports to reflect the world as it really is reflects the world only as imagined by small minds, as through a glass darkly. The art here, however, is a reminder of beauty and of things that endure. There are some sentimental pieces, to be sure, just as sentimentalism plays its part in the real world. And there is the reassurance of images classical and timeless. Boughs of flowers, ocean crests, dusky mountains, a silver goblet and pear, a stately building of times gone by, the face of a finely bred hunting spaniels, portrait of mother and child, these are the elements of life and art too often ridiculed. And yet precisely these elements reach out to us here, today, offering solace in the midst of pain and hopelessness.