Nine years ago today I experienced cardiac arrest, and I started a journey to becoming a new person. One of the ongoing fun bits related to my heart attack and eventual recovery, was that my friend – famed bookstore co-owner, and local arts organization legend – Kelsey finally accepted the reality of narwhals!
You see, it – the existence of narwhals that is – had been a minor contention between us for quite a while (see above image). I’d mention the unicorn of the sea and she’d push back. But when I woke up from my ordeal and began sorting through the notes, good vibes, and other well-wishes I found a Post-It note from Kelsey. On it she drew the beast and wrote above it, POR VIDA – “for life!” She told me that since I’d pulled through, she could accept the truth of narwhal-kind!
I’ve kept Kelsey’s Post-It note up all these years, right there in my kitchen where I can see it daily. But this year I felt it was appropriate to take it to the next level. I’ve commissioned a local tattoo artist to bring Kelsey’s drawing to life on my very flesh!
Once it is healed up I’ll add a nice shot of it to this post. I’m grateful to people like Kelsey, who have given me so much joy and hope in humanity over the years. She is a true community spirit, someone who understands kindness and laughter. And I’m proud to carry her drawing with me – on me! – from now on, a reminder to seize the day, be happily present, and to embrace the wondrous absurdities all around us.
Eight years ago today one of the few most significant pivots of my life happened. My cardiac arrest is intimately tied to the death of my sister, to my experience of my home town, to my understanding of life and spirituality, and to my way of moving through every day life.
This year I’m commemorating the traumaversary with a new version of an old work. I first created Situation and Circumstance Overcome in 2003. It is definitely my most successful and most owned work, as I’ve created many copies – both paintings and prints – of the work as fundraisers for adoptions and other charitable occasions. For this version I chose to use my AxiDraw X&Y plotter. Using a new print of my old mezzotint plate of the piece (fig. 1) as a visual source, I created a large vectored image in Inkscape that had roughly 30 layers printed upwards of 5 times each (fig. 2).
Fig. 1: Situation and Circumstance Overcome. Mezzotint print on paper. 16×20 inches. 2023.
Ink the vectored image you can see many of the layers along with the direction of the hatch fills and choices I made for density of pigment load. Each color was created with Sharpies, Posca acrylic markers, and a few other ink-based markers. The layers shown in the Inkscape file don’t correspond fully to the final image (fig 3.) because I made adjustments/changes to individual layers as I moved through building the image. There is a call and response between the digital and physical realms here that I really appreciate. I’ve also included a few details of the piece so you can see the finer textures and lines.
Fig. 3: Situation and Circumstance Overcome (’24 Traumaversary Version). Ink and acrylic on Arches paper. 16×20 inches. 2024.
I like having a rich, sentimental image like this following me through life. I’m convinced we’re all sentimental (if we’re honest and not sociopathic). By this word I don’t mean any kind of unexamined, saccharine idealization of some past version of reality. Rather, I mean that we really did experience real things in our pasts, and those things carry with them real emotions, real artifacts of our real selves. In some sense, sentimentality can give us momentary access to who we used to be in the past. It is a simultaneous connection and rupture. We know we can’t return to that person or that experience. And we know that we can’t really feel anything the same way again. And yet… some part of that reality is there for us in our sense of sentimentality. It’s akin to a certain scent or song taking us back to a prior state of being. There’s nothing wrong with this. Moreover, I suspect it has some adaptive advantage for the species by stimulating social/familial/relational/tribal/spatial cohesion.
In any case, I think making the image of life in the form of tiny sapling breaking up between the bricks has been a worthy thing for me. It’s a little picture of triumph in the midst of hardship. I’m glad it resonates with so many people. I’m glad variations of this piece hang in homes all over the world. And I’m glad I’m still here to appreciate it and add to its legacy.
I’m glad I didn’t miss these last eight years. There have been a lot of situations to overcome, but the life I’ve seen makes it all worth it. Here’s to another year. Peace.
If you’d like to inquire about purchasing the traumaversary robot version of Situation and Circumstance Overcome, contact me over here.
Well, I think I said all I really needed to say at the one year anniversary of my cardiac arrest – you can read about that here.
But I still wanted to throw a few remembrances up here to mark the occasion. What’s interesting to me is that even before I was really making memories again (because of the medications, etc) I got back some of my sense of humor.
Apparently I still felt waaaay out of it, as you can see here:
But I REALLY loved that oxygen mask…
It’s always nice to get a dose of high-percentage oxygen while pretending to be Darth Vader!
I woke up a couple times before being back to myself, which was about a week later on February 24th. Here’s a picture of me in my natural state – on the iPad :)
I like this picture because it’s the first one where I seem normal – holding my head up, looking focused – after the event. I think it’s good to mark these “traumaversary” days with thankfulness – and I am.
It’s amazing how little Atticus was then, how big he is now, and how that amazing personality is shining through. I loved how my kiddos came around me. Those notes and hugs are so precious to me. I have saved many of the drawings, notes, and other ephemera that came to me in that room in Utica, NY.
I have scars on my arm from where the port was in, and scars on my nose from where I tore out my intubation… man, I’m glad I don’t remember some of that stuff… throwing up, aspirating on the vomit… ugh.
Glad to be on this side of it. And to have worked out enough to shrink that massive neck paunch I had back then. Sheesh!
eikonktizo 