It was from a tiny little black-and-white photograph, and, when I drew it, I could remember the color of each one of their bathing suits. I did a drawing of my wife and her mother and her sister and my daughter. The act of drawing is very, very focused, but a part of your mind can flow and think about things at the same time. Drawing is something that comes very naturally to me, and I've been drawing since I was a kid. I think it's a sort of natural place to go when you have a loss, someplace to put your feelings and I think that's what I did with drawing. On sketching his wife from photographs to soothe his griefīeing a visual artist or being a writer or composer. I was trying to do everything I did, but then this other part of me was not quite either present or thinking, and so I was walking into walls, tripping over curbs, all this crazy stuff. I just wasn't looking at things or I was concentrating so hard being kind of normal and regular and presenting that face to the world that I sort of turned off another part of myself. One could say that, "Well, these things happen," but they just kept happening for the first year, year and a half or two after my wife died. On a string of injuries after his wife's death, such as breaking his nose and foot Santlofer based these sketches of himself, daughter Doria and his late wife Joy on family photographs. ![]() Those were the things that I had a lot of trouble doing. The idea of not going to a movie - my wife was a movie addict and when I didn't want to go she would just say "Well, you just have to sit there it's no big deal." But I found that hard, the sort of taking pleasure from things that my wife and I would do together. ![]() I tried very hard to resume my life in a normal way. So, in fact, I sort of not only went back to my life, I went back to it in a sort of bigger way, that is the activities of my life, because I needed a lot of distraction. I took on lots of commission painting work. I tend to think of myself, or had thought of myself, as a pretty cool, independent guy, but I had a lot of trouble being in my loft. I started to not be able to sleep again, and having similar nightmares that I had been having. I think closure is really an overused word - that's for sure - and I wasn't necessarily looking for closure, but I was looking for the reason that my wife had died, and getting that autopsy two years later with no cause of death sort of opened up the entire thing for me again. Then they said, "Well, it was never done." "It was lost." And that took almost two years for me to get the autopsy, and basically when I got the autopsy and read it, there was no cause of death listed at all, which was the shocking thing. They would say, "Well, we sent it to you." Nothing had been sent. I don't know whether or not to assign blame but it was a very odd sort of continuum of circumstances where literally I would hear, "Well, the autopsy has been lost." "It was not performed here at the coroner's office." "No it was at the hospital." "Fill out this form." "We'll get it to you." I'd go back to the hospital. It was very odd, because I could not get the autopsy. ![]() On trying to find out the cause of Joy's death "Drawing has made it possible for me to stay close to Joy when she is no longer here," Santlofer writes in his memoir, The Widower's Notebook. Over the course of about 80 drawings, he found that his sketches brought him back in time, to the moment when the photographs were originally taken. Though he continued living in the loft that they had shared, he initially put away all of the photographs of his wife, because they were too painful to look at.īut as time wore on, Santlofer would bring out the images so that he could sketch copies of them. Joy died suddenly - possibly from medications interacting badly - and Santlofer was left in what he calls a "fugue state" of grief.
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