It was just before the new year, just after my father died. I had just come home to give a talk to my online class. The first question from my student was: “What do you mean, it’s the small things that matter?” I paused. The question caught me unaware, and struck unexpectedly deep. I was thinking about something else — about beginning the new year with a goal that was small, or simple, or secret. Something one could accomplish easily, rather than making big plans or resolutions. Rather than make a huge splash, make a small offering. Something small enough to hold in your hand.

“What do you mean, it’s the small things that matter?” It took me some time to reply. I found myself saying: “I just watched my father die. When someone goes, they leave their footprints behind. An afterimage emerges but there is no one left to pose for a picture. What impression did he leave behind? What memory embosses my heart? His accomplishments, his possessions, his silver hair? He prized these things above all else. But my father is gone. It is not his medical inventions, his success, his beautiful hand-crafted Japanese knives or even his blue and white pinstriped dress shirt I wear to paint in that matter. What matters most to me now is the memory of the little things, the small gestures.”

My father was always curious about my work as a calligrapher. In his last year, he moved back to California. One of his first stops was a visit to an old friend. She lived alone on a ranch with horses and peacocks. He had not seen her for half a century, and at 97, still held vivid images from their youth. Later I received a long box by post filled with peacock feathers he gathered on her land. “Can you make quills with these?” he asked.

My father sent me a box of peacock feathers.

In his last months, when he became less mobile, he would sit in his chair on the sand of Laguna Beach, and watch the gulls soar. They dropped feathers at his feet. Every few days I’d receive an envelope, addressed in his shaky hand, full of seagull feathers. Often he enclosed a short note: “Lulu, more cooperative seagulls, more fine points.” And then later, by phone: “What about the tiny ones?” he wondered, “can you write with those?”

A series of small envelopes arrived with various sizes of seagull feathers.

I went out to California to spend the last few weeks of my father’s life with him. He did not want to die. He did not want me to leave his side. “You can sleep here”, he said, patting one side of his narrow Hospice bed filled with tubes and wires, and his long legs that could no longer move or feel. He did not want to go, even after his six-foot-four-inch body was spent.

Each morning at dawn, before going to spend the day with my father, I would go down to the beach and watch the sandpipers with their long skinny legs run along the shore. The ocean and sky, just getting light, were ever-changing shades of blue.

Back home now, I wonder, where am I? Everything has changed. It is Christmas morning in Covid. Begin where you are, I say to myself. But where am I? Somewhere in the field of grief. I begin by spending time with the color blue. Finding my way with my hands. Grief out my fingers. Touch. I pick up a small seagull quill. With it I draw shore birds. I make shades of blue in my sketchbook: cerulean, indigo, ultramarine. Feathers. Birds. Flight. Gone. Blue.

Quick blind contour drawings of the sandpipers along the shore in my travel sketchbook.

Blind contour sketches of sandpipers using the blues from my palette

Poetry is a source of comfort. I know Marie Howe’s poem, The Gate, by heart, and now it speaks to me in new ways. When someone goes, they not only leave a space behind, but that space is also a gate, an opening to walking into the world changed. You are not the same person when someone close to you goes. In my case, the entire family configuration has changed. Some things I can leave behind now. Some new things are coming. Marie Howe says it best:

I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world
would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man
but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,
rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.
— Marie Howe "The Gate”

What small thing are you doing to begin this new year? I’d love to hear from you.