Eulogy for Claire

    Cancer has no patience for perfectionists.  It laughs at your aspirations.  It snubs your life’s work.  It reshuffles and redefines hopes and dreams without mercy.   All in all Claire had some pretty simple goals:  to bring some honest art into the world, to raise wonderful children, and to try to live a good life in the face of a terminal diagnosis. 

    Despite her prodigious talents, it feels like a lie to tell you that in the time she had that she somehow finished her mission or achieved all her goals.  And I find myself struggling today because – while it’s impossible to sum up anyone’s life – it’s especially hard to understand the life of a wonderful person, at the peak of her powers, cut short and left incomplete.  It’s just wrong.  And it hurts.  

---

    I do think that Claire, as an artist and as a mom, always had a little experience with chaos.  She wasn’t afraid of it.  She knew it presented opportunities as well as challenges.  And she had ways of keeping her head, taking it all on, finding her rhythm, and staking out her ground. 

    As an artist, she explored abstract expressionism, in painting and collage.  I can tell you that her work could often mystify her database-programmer husband.  But over the years I learned a few things.   

    One thing I learned, no matter how many days and weeks had passed, was never to ask whether a piece was finished yet.  I also learned to be very careful when she asked me if a piece was finished.  After a while we both realized it was a question only she could ask, and that only she could answer.   

    I’m not sure the answer always mattered to her.  It could also be very dangerous in our house to get too fond of a painting.   She kept coming back to them.  She kept working on them, and I think they kept working on her. 

    Many times I’d come home to find one of my favorites radically re-worked.  There was a period when she would get a painting just right, then cover it up with layers of white paint, like skin.  One of her favorite techniques was been to take a piece, cut it up into pieces and re-assemble it into something else.   

    “But I liked that!”  I complained.   

    “I had a new idea,” she said.   

    “But you were finished!”  I said.  “Why couldn’t you have a new idea with a new piece?”  

    These were the kind of superfluous questions a programmer might ask.   

    I used to wonder whether she was somehow torturing herself.  I was a Recovering Perfectionist, and Claire started out with a bit of that tendency too.  But I think it evolved into a technique, a kind of grammar for her art.   

    If you go back and look at her Artist’s Statements over the years, you find a lot of thought about working and reworking, and about life and death. 

She wrote: 

    I am interested in looking directly at the reality of destruction and loss, to confront and honor the fragility and tenuousness of human life... 

    I have always been interested in the concept of fragmentation, how life may be experienced in bits and pieces… 

    I work alternately to clarify and obscure images, to shift between the fragmentation, the bits and pieces, and integration.  Working in this manner is almost like the experience of going back and forth with a camera lens, moving in and out of focus...inhabiting a kind of transitional space, oscillating between absence and presence.  This tenuous compositional state is what excites me in art because it is most like the fragility and fleetingness of life itself.  

    It sounded pretty good.  But I’m not sure I really understood it, with my linear, programmer brain.  And now when I’m missing Claire the most, I find myself looking harder at the paintings in a new way, and listening to them. 

    Life experienced as bits and pieces.  Oscillating between absence and presence.  I know a little more about that now.  We can let the camera lens move in and out of focus and savor what swims into view.  

    Claire was the youngest of the four children of Bob and Helen, and I see parts of her in each of her siblings.  And she looked up to each of them, like youngest’s do.  She loved Ginny’s buoyancy and vivaciousness, Danny’s sly humor and light touch, Chris’s intensity and passion.  And not one of the four – or their parents – was ever afraid of hard work.  And she was fiercely proud of the creativity they all shared.  I think all these qualities mixed in Claire too, in some kind of unique alchemy, and she was both like them and like no one else I’ve ever known.   

    I first met Claire at a Friday the 13th party.  We both worked in the same office at the old Boston Phoenix.  I was a cub reporter, 24, and she was sat across the office from me compiling arts listings.  I had confided to a guy in the office that I was very attracted to her.  He gave me bad news:  she was 27 – ancient -- and had four kids.  Maybe he was trying to scare me off – if so, it worked! 

    Ok, so she walks through the door at this party, and she looks directly at me with a warm smile that could melt the polar ice caps.  I start talking with her, because you do not walk away from that smile.  She’s 23.  No kids!  Somehow we segue from a conversation about Attack of the 50-Foot Woman to a deep conversation about our families – the kind of stuff I never shared with anybody.  We spent the whole party together.   

    She confided that she had noticed me at the Phoenix, and had been nursing a little crush on me!   

    Can you imagine how I must have felt when this absolutely stunning woman fixed her eyes on me and said that?   

    I think I cleared my throat and said something like: 

    “Oh yeah.  That can happen sometimes.” 

    What I was really thinking was, “Oh my God, am I dreaming?  Who put her up to this?” 

    I had no car, but naturally I offered to walk her home, which would have been pretty time-consuming, considering the party was in Allston, and she lived in Somerville, which was five miles away. She managed to graciously decline, and probably saved our relationship right there.  Still we arranged to meet the next Sunday and spend some time together. 

    For our first date, we walked from Harvard Square to one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever known.  It was Mt. Auburn Cemetery.  Bits and pieces.  We had our first kiss down past Primrose Path – no joke – on the banks of Halcyon Pond.   

    If you had met me that day, you probably would have said I was full of myself.  The truth was:  I was empty of myself.  I was full of something else, probably because I assumed you had to be full of something.  Oh I was!   

    Inside, I felt my perfectionism and caustic self-criticism like an abscess.   

    What I noticed about Claire on our first date was, #1, she really was beautiful.  (Am I repeating myself?)  And #2, she somehow had a way of stripping me of all my pretensions and leaving me utterly comfortable and natural in her presence.  I think to this day that the secret of her charm throughout her life was her authenticity.   You could watch a thought ripple across her face as it occurred to her.  You could watch a hint of amusement bloom into a smile, then a laugh, and then you had to laugh too. 

    You couldn’t help, when you were with her, feeling more comfortable with yourself.  You couldn’t help, when you were with her, falling a little bit in love with her.   

    I know.  It happened to me, over and over, every day of our marriage. 

    What I didn’t notice about Claire on our first date was that she had already begun the process of understanding me, piece by piece, fragment by fragment.  She had a gentle way of helping me take myself apart and put myself back together.  She was the artist of our relationship. 

    As it turned out in our lives, we would face our share of oscillating between absence and presence. 

    When my father died suddenly ten days before our wedding, Claire was there to support me.  She was amazing.  She comforted me on our wedding day.  She helped me mourn when we should have been on our honeymoon.  We got more serious about life.  We bought a house together in Arlington.  We started trying to have a baby, and found out we had fertility problems.  We resolved to adopt.  My mom was diagnosed with leukemia, and we put children on hold.  Two weeks before my mom died, Claire found out she was pregnant.  My mom got to see Eva’s first baby picture, a delicate grain of rice on a blurry ultra-sound, before she passed away.  Absence and presence.   

    Claire loved being a mom, to baby Eva and then to Griffin.  It was hard work.  We weren’t ready for it.  Who is?  We worked hard through the challenges, the exhaustion, the zero-sum game of allocating precious time between kids, each other and ourselves.  We found sustenance in new family rituals, routines and rhythms.  We walked the kids to Brackett School.  We walked the dog.  We had cocktails on the deck.  Claire orchestrated every Christmas like Mrs. Claus herself, arranging for overstuffed stockings and cinnamon buns every Christmas morning.  I think we thought it would go on forever. 

    Our kids became tweens, then teens.  They did their job:  they stirred things up.  There were bumpy roads and sometimes scary times.  But Claire knew her kids and fought for them tenaciously.  And she was determined to respect their world and celebrate their growing independence.  And she always had that faith that one snapshot of a moment in a child’s life was one scrap in the collage, and that love was the glue.  

    The diagnosis – Stage 4 Lung Cancer – came as a complete shock, because Claire had never smoked, and she had always been extraordinarily healthy.  We knew from the start the prognosis was not good.  Sickness can turn you into a traveler in your own life.  At some point you cross over into a place where the normal rules don’t apply.  A terminal illness is more like a kidnapping.  You’re ripped away from what you love, taken on a forced march.  You’re subjected to an unending series of discomforts and indignities.  You leave behind the habits that have sustained you, and the terms of your relationship with others change – even with the ones you love the most.   

    “I don’t know how someone is supposed to handle all this!”  Claire cried at one point.  As if that defined the terms of the agreement:  life pitched challenges to you, and you handled them.  Which wouldn’t explain tsunami’s, war zones, or Stage 4 cancer.  Some things you just don’t handle.   

    A novel treatment gave her 18 months of pretty good time.  We knew how lucky we were, and I like to think we made the most of it.  We did some traveling; we held hands, and spent a lot of time looking into each other’s eyes.  Some days we talked and talked.  Some days we didn’t have to talk at all.   

    She died on Christmas Day.  At first I was mad.  I couldn’t believe it happened on Christmas!    Then I began to focus on the bits and pieces, the gifts we all gave each other this special season.  

• Bob’s deep faith; 
  
  
• Helen’s endless strength and support; 
  
  
• Ginnie’s laughter and optimism; 
  
  
• The way Jeremy dropped everything to get Ginnie to Boston; 
  
  
• Danny and John’s amazing love for each other, and what comfort they gave me; 
  
  
• Chris’s warmth and gentleness with Claire and the kids; 
  
  
• The rock-solid support from my brother Gregg all those times I called him; 
  
  
• The amazing web of support of family and friends:  how cousin Nancy bought a plane ticket so Aunt Molly could stay with Bob in New Jersey and Helen could come up to Boston to watch the kids, so I could stay in the hospital with Claire. 
  
  
• The friends who gave us meals for THREE MONTHS.  Jack Rogers one night driving through a blizzard to deliver a dinner! 
  
  
• The day the kids snuck Luna the dog into the Cardiac ICU. 
  
  
• The lullabies Griffin and Eva sang at Claire’s bedside in the hospital; the way she found the strength to sing back. 
  
  
• And Claire of course, my Claire – the words she repeated over and over the last day she could talk:  “I love you!”  and “I’m so lucky!” 
  
  
• And the tenacious smiles she gave each of us, locking onto our eyes the day before she died – when she couldn’t talk any more. 
  
  
• The way Eva leaned over her mother just moments before she died, and said, “It’s all right, Mom.  You can go now.” 

These too are all fragments of the collage. 

    At the end, was Claire finished?  Well, I was taught never to ask that question.  The sculptor Giacometti, who Claire admired, believed that no work of art is ever finished.  What you see when you look at a piece is the incomplete record of the artist at work.  Maybe a life well-lived, like art, can never be a finite or finished object.  Maybe, like Claire believed, you keep looking at it, and it keeps working on you. 
 
    Now the work of grieving has begun.  And I know how Claire would have helped us do it.  Covering and uncovering.  Shifting between fragmentation and integration.  Taking the pieces apart and putting them back together.  Looking for what emerges in that space between absence and presence.   

    I look at the marks made on a fragmented canvas.  I let the camera lens swim in and out of focus.  Here is some of what I see: 

    A chance conversation with a good friend on the corner; 

    The lingering warmth of a peck on the cheek; 

    The lasting taste of a homemade cup of cocoa on a snow day; 

    The warm love at the center of an admonition; 

    A voicemail asking me to come home; 

    The song within a delighted laugh; 

    The eternal beauty of a sudden smile; 

    A deep gaze into twinkling, knowing brown eyes; 

    A kiss in the kitchen; 

    All the countless little acts of love that weave their way through a good life. 

    The conversation goes on.  On the walls, in my heart, in the faces of friends, in the eyes of my two spectacular, resilient children.  The work is a bounty that is all around me.    

    And I am so grateful. 

Delivered by her husband, Chip Bloche 
March 1, 2014