Connections/Grief

My name is Andrea Bayer. I'm a curator in the department of European paintings. My topic is "Grief."

About two years ago, my lovely parents, Jackie and Nat, started to go into decline and over the course of the last year, both of them died. I think of them as youngsters

but in fact they were both quite aged. As you've lived longer and longer it's less and less

easy to escape from grief because the people that surround us

are going through troubles and trials and tribulations, and we experience that with them.

How many of us have been huddled around hospital beds, sitting side by side with someone in palliative care, and the doctors have said, "This is a matter of time, there is no more that we can do."

All of these things are positions of grief that you can witness any day in a hospital: head

in hands, slumped over, some are introspective, some are out there throwing their arms up. The premonition of death and the grief to come.

Almost all of us have loved someone the way Venus loves Adonis. And when you think of all the young military wives, whose husbands have to leave them to fight. They don't know whether they will be able to see them again and bring them back to their side.

Titian was one of those artists who I think could bring together life, love, lust, and just around the corner, death.

Rembrandt depicts a woman lying on her bed with her head in a pillow. It's obviously someone that he's very attached to. She's very ill, and he sees her lying there at the end of life, thinking about her disappearing. And then

he surrounds her with all of these vignettes of other figures, young, old. It's as if life encircles her, but she is at the moment of death.

Funerals are a moment of closure. Although I had to contribute to the funerals of

both of my parents, I don't remember anyone else who was there. It was a completely

inner experience for me, as if I had been enclosed in one of those great hoods, completely wrapped in my own grief, concentrated on my own sense of the meaning of the moment.

Romare Bearden's view of a funeral is much more about the

community and people getting together and this soul going up to heaven in a burst of color. There's something vibrant

and life affirming about this funeral. In fact, the only thing that strikes me as being sad is

the young boy, a figure with a lot of gravity and tenderness. It brings the flip side into this community in which life continues.

This has been a gloomy period for me, personally, and I hope that I'm at the end of it.

I know that my parents would want me to be at the end of it. Because my parents spent a lot of time in the Museum themselves, right after they died the place that was most wretched

for me was the Great Hall, where I always met them and always saw them. Once I got over that immediate sensation, I

started this other process, in which as I walked through the Museum, things called out to me, as a daughter

or as a mother, as someone who had deeply loved people

and then lost them.