One Last Time
The Cost of Being Mortal (warning: this text mentions suicide)
As Oliver Burkeman reminds us in his 2021 bestseller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, one unavoidable consequence of mortality is that there is a last time for everything.
There will be a last time I lock the door to my apartment, a last time I ride my bike across the East River to my studio, a last time I will spend a holiday meal with my family. Compounding the sense of tragedy is that most of time, I won’t know it is the last time.
I certainly did not know it was the last time I would see my wife, Ewa, when she kissed me goodbye and left our Krakow apartment on a June evening in 2019. Well, I was able to see her one more time as I held her lifeless body at the hospital the next day, some time after she had died by suicide. My life was understandably turned upside down by that event, and the ripple effects of that emotional trauma continue to this day.
I recently sat down with photographer Susan Rosenberg Jones to participate in her long term project, Widowed. We chatted for an hour about my experience of loss, and then she made a portrait of me. The transcription of our conversation, along with the portrait she made, are on the Widowed webpage on her site. There is a link to that project at the bottom of this newsletter. I urge you to visit the project, it’s engrossing and impressive.
Below on the left is the portrait she made of me, on the right is one I made of Ewa in Krakow in 2010.
One thing that helped sustain me emotionally in the immediate aftermath of Ewa’s death, aside from my family, was that I was completely absorbed in my current photo project at the time, My Childhood Reassembled (link at bottom). I was determined to plow ahead and finish the series, which I did, about a year and a half after the tragedy.
And since this practice of uninterrupted work seemed to work so well to keep my eventual depression at bay, I decided to dive headlong into my next project. The theme would be, not surprisingly, love and death, themes very much on my mind.
Things began well enough. I always start with a mood board, and for inspiration I turned to one of my favorite sources–the old masters of Western art. I have always loved the Garden of Eden compositions by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The biblical characters of Adam and Eve felt right for my purposes, at least as a point of departure. In addition, Ewa was a serious student of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), so it seemed fitting for that reason as well. The title for the series is The Great Reconciliation. I came up with this title before I discovered the Leonard Cohen quote at the bottom of this text, but I love the connection.
My next task, before casting for models, would be to construct the “Garden of Eden” miniature set. This would prove to be much more of a challenge than I anticipated. All of my previous projects had been interior scenes. Making a convincing exterior exterior set was tricky, all that detail! I made a habit of buying as many small flowers and leafy plants as I could at the various flower stands on the way to my studio almost every day. It wasn’t long before I had enough of an inventory to begin constructing my very own “Garden of Eden”. But I had to double the scale I was accustomed to employing in order achieve the detail I felt necessary.
In the next newsletter, I will continue to chart my progress, which has been a formidable creative struggle. A depression induced creative block (which I have written about here previously) was a major hindrance. Depression is still too often an unwelcome visitor, but I am happy to report much progress on the project has been made, and as of this writing I am working on the last piece in the series. Hallelujah!
“This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can…reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah’.
LEONARD COHEN
Susan Rosenberg Jones, Widowed: https://www.susanrosenbergjones.com/widowed
(I am at the very bottom of the webpage)
My Childhood Reassembled: https://richardtuschman.com/FINE-ART-PORTFOLIOS/MY-CHILDHOOD-REASSEMBLED/6/thumbs-caption
always inspired by your honesty, creativity, courage, strength, patience. the foliage looks incredible. looking forward to more. best wishes. m
You know I love your work, Richard, and I am looking forward to The Great Reconciliation. I am grateful to you for agreeing to sit for me and share your story and feelings about losing Ewa.