Give Death a Hug Back
I came to death at fourteen, through books. Grief came later, with names. On the smile in my paintings, the grandfather who taught it to me, and why every canvas is built to outlive its painter.
In the last good year of my grandfather's life, I sat down across from him with a list of questions I'd pulled off the internet.
He was ninety-three. You could tell it was coming — he looked pretty good one year, and the next year he didn't. So I typed the thing into the search bar that nobody wants to type: what are the best questions to ask someone before they pass away? Because I don't always have good questions in moments like that. Nobody does. The moment is too heavy to improvise in, and I wanted depth, not small talk. Then I sat with him and we went through his whole life — his first kiss, the work, all of it, everything he'd done in ninety-three years.
Here's what I actually took from those visits, and it wasn't the answers.
He was happy. One of his sons had died before him. His wife had died before him. And what was left in him, at the end, was this clear, deliberate gratitude for life exactly as it was. I think he'd seen the futility of spending his last stretch hurt or upset — because if you knew you only had a year left, why spend it being upset? Why spend it sad, or angry? When we're young it's easy to get taken over by our emotions, to wear them like masks. He'd put the masks down. He just leaned into being grateful for everything that was.
That's the smile in my paintings. He taught it to me by dying well.
I came to death early, and not through grief. At fourteen I was reading the Egyptian Book of the Dead the way other kids read comics — drawn to the old, liberated way of seeing it, death as instruction instead of horror. Buddhism, where death reads as a return to infinite consciousness. There's a meditation in Buddhism that sits you in a particular seat: you watch your own body die and decay. You hold the image of yourself as a corpse. And what the practice shows you isn't the rot — it's the one still watching. The observational self. I've believed for a long time that consciousness comes first and the body is the incarnation — the way god gets to experience itself. So death never arrived in my life as something morbid. It arrived as the most interesting thing anyone refused to talk about.
The grief came later, the way it does — friends, family, my grandmother, who went sudden and unknown, and who was one of my best friends. That's when mortality stopped being a fascination and became a weight with names attached. The real depth of it. The inevitability, coming.
So this is the project, stated plainly: make peace with it before it arrives. So that when it shows up I'm not scared of the thing in the doorway. Death has been reaching for every one of us since the day we were born. I'm trying to give death a hug back.
Notice that almost nothing in your life prepared you for that sentence. We're taught nothing about death. There's no class. It doesn't come up. Families won't say the word. Funerals get staged like horror — dark rooms, hushed dread — while in other cultures the same event is a celebration: a person in transition into another moment. Our culture's whole posture toward death is a happy-face turned firmly away from it. That's not a smile. A smile looks at the thing.
Painting has the same flinch. A lot of people want a painting to be pretty — a thing I put in my house, hey, happy smiley. And I understand the impulse, but it shrinks art down from what it was built to do. The oldest painting we have wasn't decoration. Hieroglyphs scratched into a wall weren't designed to be pretty — beautiful at points, sure, but designed to transmit: an overwhelming abundance of information that words fall significantly short of. The experiences of god and death don't show up in language. They show up in images.
There's a book Basquiat worked from — Henry Dreyfuss's Symbol Sourcebook — and early in it the word poison is written out in language after language, and beside all of them sits one skull and crossbones. Every language on the page reads it. The skull is the one word everyone alive can read.
That's the lineage the old death painters belonged to — the vanitas painters with their skulls and rotting fruit, the memento mori, and Basquiat with his crowns. They could see the doom every one of us is headed for, and they painted it anyway, sincerely, while everyone else painted gorgeousness. Painting since has mostly traded transmission for decoration. It flinches from sincere death the same way it flinches from money — they're the two subjects décor can't survive.
People imagine painting death must feel heavy at the easel. It's the opposite of heavy. I go to the canvas with no intention — I'm not thinking now I'll meet my fear, now the chaos. I just start painting the feelings I'm going through. I watch my breath. I check my stance — half the time I'm in horse pose, doing yoga at the easel. And as the painting comes alive, each one brings its own expression up out of the surface, and my job shrinks to witness and observer — feeding it, trying to keep it happy. The discipline is in not trying: not trying to do too much, not trying to be special, not trying to be good. Just being in my body, aware. That's what lets this part of me surface at all.
And the paintings keep doing what the old myths did. Apophis — the falling-star god who destroys the world, which was probably an asteroid all along — was a comforting mythology, because knowing is half the battle. The unknown is the thing we're actually afraid of. We waste years scatterbrained over problems that never arrive, worrying ourselves sick about fears that never culminate in anything. A painting that looks straight at the fear is doing the oldest job in the culture: making the unknown into something you can know, and stand in front of, and live beside.
So when people ask what the smile is — it isn't defiance, and it isn't a joke. It's recognition. Reverence, more than anything: death as a doorway, or a window, or a bridge into the eternal self. I'm not a specifically religious person. But after enough years in the old texts, and enough moments in my own life I can only call miracles, you form an overwhelming respect for what's happening here.
I paint in professional acrylic on linen now — materials chosen to outlast me. From day one I've been trying to make objects that outlive their maker. A death painting built to survive its painter isn't irony. It's the whole point.
Because the day is the reason there's work at all. Most people don't recognize the futility of trying to escape death, so they live like they have all the time in the world to waste. I knew I didn't. That's why I chose this — painter, my own strange business, my own plan — instead of following someone else's and finding out at the end that I'd been unhappy inside those choices. More than thinking about the day it happens, I think about what knowing it's coming has already done: it built everything.
What I want to be true that day is simple. I want to have felt like I did everything. And I want the work still standing — over somebody's table, in somebody's hand — passing along the only thing I ever asked it to carry: unshakable faith. Lean in. Pursue yourself. Take full advantage of the life you've been given.
This miracle.
