The summer that my sister Parrish died was a long and arduous one.  Not just because it was painful to watch her deteriorate before our eyes, but because it was slow.  When death comes swiftly and suddenly we talk about how it all happened way too fast and about how we wished we had more time with the deceased.  But when you are sitting around the house day after day waiting for death to finally show up, it can be more tedious than watching paint dry.

We all tried to keep busy.  We took turns at the tattoo parlor getting our tattoos by which we would remember her.  We went on trips to the nail salon trying to keep her, and ourselves, distracted by the day to day tasks of keeping up appearances. 

My Mother Missy's Moon   &  Her Mother-in-Law Pat's Goddess

Her Beau Jeff's Hummingbird & Her Sister-in-Law Laura's Winged Hussy (nickname)

My sisters Terese and Helen created custom designs  incorporating Parrish's name

       

Family friend Barbie's Angel incorporating Parrish's date of death and My Tattoo

I catered the whole summer, as I am wont to do, and spent countless hours in the kitchen and at the market keeping the constant influx of people fed.  The house was never empty or quiet.  Friends and family were flying in on such a regular basis that we pretty much had a steady shuttle schedule to and from the San Jose airport.

Parrish went through a phase where she had a bout of Voracious Ravenousitis and couldn't stop eating.  Since she was getting to be aphasic at this point she would tear pages out of magazines to give me suggestions of what she wanted to eat.  I would prepare these or make up recipes to suit her. I highly recommend making french toast out of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls - Parrish ate 15 pieces for breakfast one morning. She would spend the day grazing her way through the refrigerator and the candy stash. The friends who know us well sent nearly 30lbs of See's Candies which we had to hide from her as she was beginning to resemble Violet Beauregarde.

Despite all the activity and the visitors, there were long hours of twiddling our thumbs and watching Law and Order reruns, uncomfortably ingnoring the fact that every episode was about death.  So, I decided that we needed a project to keep ourselves busy.  My aunt, Melantha, was getting ready to marry her third (and we hope final) husband, and I decided that what we created with our project would be their wedding gift from all of us in Parrish's honor, because we  all knew that Parrish would not be making it to the wedding.

Parrish and Melantha

On a brief visit back home, I packed up my mosaic tools, random pieces of moonstone  collected by my grandmother, odd pieces of glass and ceramic tiles, and went to Home Depot and purchased a 2' x 4' piece of wood which I had Parrish's boyfriend divide up into 32 equal squares with a pencil.  Deciding we needed more colors to play with, I then drove from the backwoods of Santa Cruz to Oakland and visited the Institute of Mosaic Art to purchase more tiles. 

 Once we were all set up, we gave Parrish a hammer and sent her out on the back deck to break up all the tiles. She couldn't talk, but she could swing a hammer like a pro.  Over the next few weeks people who came to the house to say their goodbyes were encouraged to spend some time working on a piece of the mosaic.  Some of the people who contributed had never met my aunt, but wanted to do something positive with their grief.  Others like my sister Helen and our Tia Consuelo, who is my family's Guatemalan equivalent of Mammy from Gone With The Wind, would have done the entire project themselves had we not made them share!  The project became not just an activity to keep us busy, but a source of release and entertainment.  The frustration and joy brought to bear on trying to be creative filled the house with chatter and laughter during the day and gave us time for quiet contemplation and distraction during the long nights.

When the project was finally completed, I grouted it, packed it up and shipped it off to my Aunt with instructions not to open it until we all arrived for her wedding and could present it to her.  When my husband and I unwrapped the piece to present it to her in front of our assembled family members, there was not a dry eye in the house, in part because, as we had predicted, Parrish had passed away two weeks before the wedding making the happy event bittersweet.

At the time that Melantha and Michael were getting married, they were in the process of designing a new home and immediately showed the piece to their architect and designers to let them know that this artwork would become a focal point for their living room, as they intended to hang it over the fireplace and wanted the rest of the color scheme to accentuate the piece, rather than detract from it.  The house has recently been completed and two weeks ago my husband and I traveled to Bend, Oregon to make minor repairs to the piece (thank you UPS) before it was hung.

And voila!  The mosaic in its new home.