Sunflowers and the First Tile of Grieving

My last story was about my friend, Heather, and her mushroom mosaic. I was so inspired by her creativity and the end product that I decided to make a mosaic of my own. I have never done mosaic before. I don’t consider myself very artsy or creative, although Terry said I was creative in grant writing and in the ways I expressed myself professionally. I knew at once what I wanted to cover with tiles – an ancient birdfeeder that was in the yard when we bought our house almost 30 years ago. Years ago, after a remodel of our house, I knew exactly where I wanted to relocate the bird bath—outside of the window above the sink. It is a great placement because over the years I have enjoyed wrens, cardinals, thrashers, and blue jays.  Yes, I even enjoy the blue jays who come to visit despite their aggressive personalities. On occasion I see a pair of titmice which really makes me happy. For some reason, watching birds splash around in the water never fails to put a smile on my face. 

The bird bath is solid cement with a removable bowl. I think it may have been brown originally, but now it holds several layers of white paint, chipping off in places. Last time I painted it I didn’t paint the inside of the bowl, but instead I tried to scrape away the old paint. I always worried about the birds being exposed to needless chemicals. The bowl is 20½ inches in diameter and has a gentle curve to it. When I began to think of the design it quickly occurred to me that maybe I should have picked a flat object for my first mosaic. Flat would have been easy!  But no, I go right for the more complicated shape. Choosing the challenging paths in life seems to be a pattern for me. 

I made a stand for the bowl out of a well-used large plastic flowerpot. I set the birdbath bowl on top and it fit perfectly. As I stared at the bags of tiles on the table and a completely blank “canvas” I became a little frightened. What if I couldn’t do this? What if I failed?  After a pensive moment I started to lay the tiles down on the surface of the bowl. I placed them, moved them, and played with the shapes, textures, sizes and colors. The creative process felt good. As I played with the tiles I became lost in a different world than the one my body inhabited. I left the tiles in a near final draft design for three days. Several times I looked at it, moved things around a little, and observed my budding design under different lighting conditions and from different angles. 

The pattern I settled on uses little triangles and squares in shades of blue for the border and an arrangement of mostly square tiles of two shades of blue and white. Bright yellow square tiles project from a round center of different shades of browns. In the very center I will lay a stone from somewhere I traveled. I wish I could remember where this center stone came from. It might have been the Rogue River in Oregon, the small coastal town in Oregon, the forests of the Laurel Highlands in Pennsylvania, a beach in Iceland, or another place I’ve traveled.  

Before I gathered up the tiles, I took measurements of the bowl and found the center. I knew I learned how to find the center of a circle in my 10^th grade geometry class, but who remembers things like that when you don’t have to. I Googled “how to find the center of a circle,” then followed direction. I drew chords, found the midpoints and drew perpendicular lines. Voila, I located the center of the bowl! 

The time came to lay my first tile and glue it in place. I paused and a wave of apprehension came over me. What if I needed more time to play around with the shapes and colors to perfect the design? What if I wanted to change the design after the glue dried? Was this the point of no return?

Now here is where my mosaic endeavor became interesting. I don’t know how it happened, but I began to understand my process of creating a mosaic in the context of my grief in two very meaningful ways.

First, sunflowers came into my life when Terry was in hospice. I didn’t seek out sunflowers; they found me. The first day of hospice a small bouquet of sunflowers sat on the ledge of the nursing station outside of Terry’s room. The next day, Terry’s cousin came to visit and her van had a huge sunflower attached to the roof. Since then, for three years, I have been enchanted with sunflowers. Now, vases of silk sunflowers adorn my home. My cousin gave me a sunflower face mask. Just last week sunflowers brightened my Facebook feed when my friend posted beautiful photos of her young children enjoying in a huge field of the most beautiful sunflowers I have ever seen. Without intention a stylized sunflower gradually appeared as I worked and reworked the tiles. I felt Terry’s presence. I felt him beside me and gently nudging my hands as I worked the tiles against the concrete bowl of the bird bath. 

Second, gluing the first tile connected me with my grief in a very unexpected way. The act of cementing that first tile evoked feelings of my returning to life after Terry died. As Terry laid dying in the bed at Hospice a hurricane moved closer and closer Tampa. Right after Terry died, I found myself in a household of family and pets who surrounded me with love and comfort. Heather, my mosaic muse, flew in from California. She was one of few passengers on the plane headed for Tampa. People in her layover city of Houston kept asking her, “Are you sure you want to go to Florida…now? You do know that a hurricane is headed there, right?”  My cousin, Julie, who was new to Florida and didn’t know what to expect of hurricanes, came to my house with her fiancé and their two dogs. My sons were here, as was my son’s girlfriend with her rambunctious young Australian Shephard, Brodie.  I spent the most of those first few days sitting in a recliner in the living room either staring off into space or watching, like an outsider, the activities around me. While my sons attached the Kevlar window coverings outside, Heather cooked everything she could find. I thought she was cooking like mad to feed everyone; later she told me that she was cooking all the food she could find so that it wouldn’t spoil if we lost power. As it turns out, Tampa was only sideswiped by the hurricane and we came through unscathed. After everyone went home and returned to their lives, I continued to sit in the same chair for several more days. Two weeks after Terry died, I decided I was ready to go back to work. That first morning I went through the motions – getting out of bed, showering, blow-drying my hair, drinking a cup of hot coffee. It all felt so mundane, so meaningless. As I drove to work, tears streamed down my face. I bolstered myself by telling myself, “I can do this. I can do this.” When I arrived at the parking lot, I took a few minutes to sit in my car and pull myself together. I kept my sunglasses on and walked toward the building.  I unlocked the door and headed down the long hallway to my office at the end of the hall. I took one or two steps and froze. I wanted to run in the opposite direction, back to my car, back to the comfort of the recliner in my home. How could I face my friends and colleagues at work? I was raw with emotion and I wasn’t sure I wanted others to see me like that. What if I couldn’t do this? What if I failed?  What if I burst out into tears the first time someone said, “Good morning”?  Here is where the act of laying that first bright yellow tile on the blank birdbath bowl comes in. With a deep breath and the next step toward my office I committed to healing, or as Willie Nelson put it, to get through my grief.  I didn’t know it then but taking that first step toward my office felt like laying that first bright yellow tile in my mosaic. There was no turning back, I committed to returning to life. Of course, I didn’t really know how returning to life would unfold. I just knew that living was something I had to do. That first step, taken alone, down that long hallway was the beginning of creating a new mosaic for my life without Terry at my side but always in my heart.