Sister

Someone explained to me that in losing one member of a family of five, you actually lose something like ten or more distinct relationships. Clay had an older brother and an older sister, and he was very close to them both. Perhaps they were a little more interdependent in some ways because every other relation lives an ocean away. Also, they’d all been through a lot together. Clay’s brother spent six months in various hospitals recovering from a serious skiing accident when he was eleven. Clay was only six. We didn’t know for a long time whether he’d recover, and everyone was really concerned. Clay sensed the gravity of the situation and asked, with eyes wide, “Does Chas have a… a broken leg?”

One of those lost relationships is the one between a middle sister and her little brother. I can only infer the significance of what Grace lost on 30 May, 2019 from what I observed over the preceding 18 years. Even a mother can never really know the things they shared, overcame, laughed at, or kept secret as they grew up together. I’ll never know the precise role Clay played in Grace’s life or would have played in future, and I can only draw impressions about how they were when he died. I suppose it would have been in transition, as they were both becoming adults and leaving their common nest. I do know what my own little brother has always meant to me, which makes Grace’s loss inconceivable from the start. There is specific sorrow within this yoke I carry that is just for her loss, but it’s my own sorrow and can take away none of hers.

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I understand this relationship to be beautiful, ordinary and extraordinary. It’s beautiful because they loved each other easily and always wanted the best for each other. It’s ordinary in that over the years it provided all the friction of a normal sibling relationship, the stuff required for sharpening, polishing, and humbling. The extraordinary aspect may be best seen from this series of images that seem to show something of how each saw the other. Photographs by Clay and Portrait by Grace.

One day a police detective handed Clay’s phone to back to us, and I was moved to find this series of images Clay had captured of his sister a few days before he died. We’d been in Minnesota for Chas’ college graduation. Grace and Clay were taking in the Northfield version of Main Street, USA. They appear to have been on their own, and these pictures took me by surprise. Clay took so many photos and videos in his short life, and I love having a record of the world from his point of view. Having this record of how he saw his sister, on that sunny afternoon in late May, his last May…. it almost takes my breath away.

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Just a few months after mucking about on Main Street, and certainly in the earliest stages of grief, Grace began to lay down her impressions of her brother in oil paint on a 17″x20″ canvas. She worked from a photograph taken that same weekend in Northfield and presented us with the finished portrait as a Christmas gift on that first one without him, in 2019. She’d been studying in Rome as part of her university degree, where she made art and learned Italian until Covid 19 sent all students home. Grace doesn’t give away too much about process, but I think there was therapeutic value in making it, as difficult as it was. It’s priceless to us.

It feels rather miraculous that posterity would be granted such satisfactory renditions of both views –of the look in his eyes and from behind those eyes– at almost the same point in time. It also feels deeply painful that he’s not here with us and images are all we have. So, love in loss also offers two views: enduring celebration and reverance for what once was, and inconsolable anguish for the same.

Clay was always beautful to look at, but even more appealing was to catch a glimpse of the way he saw the world. He could be savvy or childlike, thoughtful or insouciant, and sometimes he could be all of them at once. He was never pretentious and, late in life, was unfailingly spontaneous. There was always tenderness, which I think Grace captured in the way she painted his eyes. For that, I believe she was uniquely qualified.