This craftiest time of year is laced with pain
When you’ve recently lost a loved one, certain annual occasions are rough: Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries. For me, it’s Halloween. That’s when my brother was a full-steam-ahead creative force and crafty collaborator.
Right about now I’m missing his super-charged energy. I need the distraction from the dead-heat US election campaign. Whenever I’m in near fetal position watching the news of the latest misogynist spew, I wish he would walk through the front door and shatter that chatter with his usual greeting, Hey. What’s goin’ on?
My brother has been my biggest backer, my major motivator. His material explorations, unlike my mincing attempts, were bold. He took keen notice of my flirtations with trendy crafty products over the years and turned them up to 11, sponge-painting, glue-gunning, Mod-Podging and needle-felting the ridiculous and the outsized. One Halloween, in the days (weeks?) before, he and his two sons papier-maché’d two gigantic skulls that he illuminated and suspended at their front door to create all the charm of Colonel Kurtz’ camp in Apocalypse Now. He did it for the kids — all the kids.
He designed craft beer labels and websites, hand-built playhouses and kitchen cabinetry from scratch and baked up a scale-model gingerbread house of his own house. He decorated birthday cakes with panache and had a penchant for dinner plating. His Instagram account is (still) full of irreverent, self-deprecating and appreciative posts of various craftiness.
Nothing I made was too weird for his liking. Sometimes our unsolicited viewpoints clashed, which I liked because there was good takeaway there. He wasn’t shy about serving up some meaty feedback about my work-in-progress but scoffed at the notion that he was an artist himself. He often ran his well-rendered hand-drawn or Illustrator sketches by me. I would tell him that they were overly complex. He would give me the screw-you look and eventually edit his design.
When you’ve recently lost a loved one, certain annual occasions are rough: Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries. For me, it’s Halloween. That’s when my brother was a full-steam-ahead creative force and crafty collaborator.
Right about now I’m missing his super-charged energy. I need the distraction from the dead-heat US election campaign. Whenever I’m in near fetal position watching the news of the latest misogynist spew, I wish he would walk through the front door and shatter that chatter with his usual greeting, Hey. What’s goin’ on?
My brother has been my biggest backer, my major motivator. His material explorations, unlike my mincing attempts, were bold. He took keen notice of my flirtations with trendy crafty products over the years and turned them up to 11, sponge-painting, glue-gunning, Mod-Podging and needle-felting the ridiculous and the outsized. One Halloween, in the days (weeks?) before, he and his two sons papier-maché’d two gigantic skulls that he illuminated and suspended at their front door to create all the charm of Colonel Kurtz’ camp in Apocalypse Now. He did it for the kids — all the kids.
He designed craft beer labels and websites, hand-built playhouses and kitchen cabinetry from scratch and baked up a scale-model gingerbread house of his own house. He decorated birthday cakes with panache and had a penchant for dinner plating. His Instagram account is (still) full of irreverent, self-deprecating and appreciative posts of various craftiness.
Nothing I made was too weird for his liking. Sometimes our unsolicited viewpoints clashed, which I liked because there was good takeaway there. He wasn’t shy about serving up some meaty feedback about my work-in-progress but scoffed at the notion that he was an artist himself. He often ran his well-rendered hand-drawn or Illustrator sketches by me. I would tell him that they were overly complex. He would give me the screw-you look and eventually edit his design.
My brother never saw himself as an artist.
Two years ago, as summer turned to Fall he was couch-bound and riding waves of excruciating pain. I would text him stoopid videos of us synchro-dancing at a house party or bloopers from our teenage nephews’ film projects.
A couple of days before that Halloween my brother was on a fentanyl drip in the palliative care ward when the younger teenage son showed up for his dad’s creative input, in an almost-finished Semi-Pro costume. He spent the evening bedside, drawing the logo with felt pens on the singlet fashioned from an old T-shirt. Meanwhile our niece, 12, had asked for my assistance in transforming her into a strip of bacon. I received the required hand-rendering of her idea and figured it out. She cut and sewed up red and brown strips of felt to a body-height casing of white felt. It was as hasty as her drawing. I took a photo and sent it to my brother.
The day before Halloween he critiqued it. “Needs some ‘distressed’ coloring around the edges,” he texted from his hospital bed. “Maybe some of that bacon scent spray that I always see in dollar stores… what about a sash or banner that says ‘Maple Leaf’ on it?” But basic bacon was all I could muster and when I forwarded him our sister’s Halloween-night reveal photo of three girls in character of butcher, pig and bacon he texted back: “You nailed it!” Liar. But I lived for his praise.
Three days before he left this world on Christmas Day I texted him a video of our crotch-rock front-porch lip-sync from Halloween the year before.
He replied with a heart emoji.
A couple of days before that Halloween my brother was on a fentanyl drip in the palliative care ward when the younger teenage son showed up for his dad’s creative input, in an almost-finished Semi-Pro costume. He spent the evening bedside, drawing the logo with felt pens on the singlet fashioned from an old T-shirt. Meanwhile our niece, 12, had asked for my assistance in transforming her into a strip of bacon. I received the required hand-rendering of her idea and figured it out. She cut and sewed up red and brown strips of felt to a body-height casing of white felt. It was as hasty as her drawing. I took a photo and sent it to my brother.
The day before Halloween he critiqued it. “Needs some ‘distressed’ coloring around the edges,” he texted from his hospital bed. “Maybe some of that bacon scent spray that I always see in dollar stores… what about a sash or banner that says ‘Maple Leaf’ on it?” But basic bacon was all I could muster and when I forwarded him our sister’s Halloween-night reveal photo of three girls in character of butcher, pig and bacon he texted back: “You nailed it!” Liar. But I lived for his praise.
Three days before he left this world on Christmas Day I texted him a video of our crotch-rock front-porch lip-sync from Halloween the year before.
He replied with a heart emoji.
Leader of the pack
