Panic! At the National Art Gallery

There she goes writing about grief again...

Maman and I, March 2024

The Sunday Letter #53

It is 3:30 am on a Wednesday. I spent the evening before my flight packing a tidy set of clothes for the plane, laying out my boots, bra, and floss. In my carry-on is a set of business attire for the days I’ll be spending at the office. We are out of the house and on the road in fifteen minutes, ducking into the airport to avoid the frostbiting wind with families dressed for the tropics. 

I feel like I’ve only ever seen this airport at the crack of dawn. Memories of waking up at 3 am with my family to drive my mom to the airport for various academic conferences. Eating Tim Horton’s in the lobby with my dad as we waited for her plane to take off, stopping by the gift shop on the way out and begging for a new Webkinz to take home. 

This morning the security line is quiet. I pass through quickly and arrive at my gate with time to spare. I take a few ginger tablets and hope that the protein bar in my hand will help to keep my usual travel nausea at bay. I board the enormous plane to see that it’s only a third full. I take one last look at the prairies before closing my eyes. I’m on my way back to Ottawa through Toronto, and as I drift off, I remember the last time I visited my old college town.

*

It was June 2023, and I was in town for my (very delayed) graduation. A few days before leaving, I’d gotten a bright red gel manicure on my long nails, one of which broke the day before my flight. I returned to the salon in a panic, explaining that I was on the way to my graduation and only needed to fix one finger. After they kindly fitted me with a free extension, I took off to Ottawa to reunite with a campus I hadn’t seen in person in three years. In the Uber back into the city, I was amazed at how much looked exactly the same: the red brick houses, the sleepy tree-lined streets leading into the downtown core. I’d treated myself to a stay at a boutique hotel, and as I unpacked my clothes for the ceremony I jammed yet another nail on my suitcase, breaking it for the second time in as many days. I called around to every salon I could until I found someone to fix a single nail. I sat alone at a pub across the street from the salon, drinking a pint and waiting for my appointment time. I walked in, embarrassed to be there so close to closing time. The manicurist took my unsteady hand and gently glued on a replacement, the colour not quite matching the rest of the set, and I left clutching my hands tight to my chest to keep them safe. 

Despite my nerves, the graduation ceremony was a tonic. After years of grappling with undiagnosed ADHD and the grief of losing my father, I would finally be able to say that I completed my degree. The wound of failure had been replaced with a sense of relief and closure as I finally walked across the stage:

“I opened the envelope to ensure that I’d received the right diploma, that my name was on it, that it was finally all over, for real. But as I looked down at the names on my degree, I was hit all over again with the weight of the last few years. There was my first name, for my dad’s mother and his sister. My middle name, for the aunt who raised him when his own mother couldn’t. My last name, carried over to me from Chile across multiple generations and a multiplicity of paternal wounds. None of it should have been possible: his escape from the dictatorial regime of his homeland, his landing in the middle of Canada totally alone at only 27 years of age, his eventual courtship with my mother two decades later. And here I was, holding a degree that he never got to see me receive.”

The city that welcomed us both was now giving me the space to say goodbye.

*

After the ceremony, I returned to the hotel bar alone to read Sontag’s On Women and wait for an old friend to arrive from Chicago. Drinking a glass of red wine and cutting into a bloody steak, I felt gluttonous and free. I snuck out for a quick smoke as my friend turned the corner and waved. We hugged and I felt him breathe in as he said, “You smell exactly the same.” We walked over to a craft brewery where I ordered a beer that was too sour and he complained about an unrequited crush on his classmate. At some point he said, “For what it’s worth, I think you’ll make a great mother.” We paid for our drinks and I waved goodbye, wondering whether it was for the last time.

The next morning, with the graduation complete and no other obligations to attend to, I made my way to the used bookshop in my old neighbourhood. The barista and I made sleepy small talk as I told him I was visiting from out of town. “Would you ever come back?” he asked, snapping me out of the flirty banter and into reality. Could I ever move back, even if I wanted to? I just smiled at him, taking the iced matcha and letting LCD Soundsystem on the speakers wash over me. The joy I felt was warm and made up of sonic grain. I picked up a Joan Didion book and sat next to a young couple writing a travel itinerary on their laptops. “I’m just worried we won’t have time to do everything we want to do,” she whispered sadly, “And I don’t know if we’ll be able to go to Dave & Buster’s.” 

I leafed through my book, eating a chocolate croissant while the young woman turned to flip through her Snapchat stories. Her boyfriend watched her phone from over her shoulder, stopping her to say, “Wait, who was that?”

“Oh, just some guy,” she blurted out.

“Which guy?” he asked.

“The guy! I’ve told you about him. He just snapped back to my story.”

“Who?” the boyfriend sounded genuinely confused, pushing her for more details. “We don’t chat, we just used to hook up,” she shot back, “I’ve told you about him and I’m not telling you more. There’s no context. There’s really no story.” She was beginning to raise her voice.

“What’s the context?” he pushed. “We matched on Tinder,” she started to giggle, “and you’re making me nervous! He’s chill. It’s not a thing, and I’m not rehashing it with you.” 

They both go silent. After a beat she asks, “Are you mad at me right now?”

“It’s very suspicious,” he said. “What is?” she begged. He collected his things to leave and she shuffled out after him. 

I spent the day popping in and out of my old haunts, running into old classmates and laughing at how small the world really is. Another old friend picked me up to grab tacos and a drink. He spent the dinner talking about his girlfriend, making sure to say enough good things about her that by the time he rounded the corner on everything that wasn’t going well, it landed more softly. He offered to drive me across town to meet up with my cousin, and when we were alone in the car I tried to be encouraging.

“It sounds like you’re a good couple,” I told him, “You still try to communicate even when there’s…” “Issues,” he interrupted, catching us both off guard. We were silent for a moment. He hovered his hands on the shift near my knee and said, “We’re working through it.” I closed the door behind me and waved goodbye.

My cousin had moved to Ottawa from my hometown when we were still young, and as we reconnected over drinks I wondered how it felt like no time at all had passed between us. One day we were trading secrets in the backyard playhouse, collecting bugs, playing pretend. Then with a jolt we were suddenly adults, and I was meeting her cool friends for patio drinks on a balmy evening as they debated whether to join a roller derby team. “You can meet women there!” my cousin tried to convince her friend. “Why would I want to pay women to hurt me,” her friend teased back. “Besides, I already let men do it for free!”

Then, on my last day in town, I paid my respects to Maman. 

I have a special place in my heart for the National Gallery of Canada. The first time I visited was after moving to Ottawa in the fall of 2019 for my Masters degree. I’d taken a class on feminism in art history the previous winter, so I was familiar with Louise Bourgeois’ spider series. What I was not prepared for, however, was her looming size: over 30 feet of bronze, steel, and marble. Inspired by Bourgeois’ own mother, Maman represents fertility and security, a mother ready to spin a web around her young. I’ve visited her countless times, but I’ve only allowed myself to touch her once or twice, as though I am rationing her protection.

The gallery was showing a collection of Paul Gaugin’s work when I first arrived in 2019, and I wandered the exhibit full of hope for the program I was joining, the woman I was becoming. I purchased a coffee table book about Gaugin for my dad and brought it home for him over the Christmas break. His health was already much worse than it had been when I left; he was using up so much oxygen it was getting difficult to maintain a steady supply of tanks at home. When I showed him the book, he gasped. “You have to write me a message,” he directed me as he reached for a pen, “so that I know it was from you.” 

He left the house to move into long term hospital care that spring, a few weeks before Covid-19 became global news. I’d already moved home by then, and I stopped by their house to grab a few things before I made my way to the hospital to see him. Over Facetime, he asked me to write his signature on one of the completed paintings. “It’s done, it just needs to be signed,” he instructed me. Unsure, I picked up a small brush and a tin of black paint, and I followed another piece of his as an example. The signature had always resembled Picasso’s, a fact which made me smile as I tried to replicate it too.

Picasso, the man after whom he’d tried to model an artist’s life in exile. Picasso, who named his daughter Paloma. My dad, who named his daughter Paloma too. Paloma, Spanish for dove and peace. Years after he passed, I was looking through a few of his paintings when I spotted one with a signature that looked a little off. I stared and stared, trying to figure out why it looked so alien, until I realized it was my signature looking back at me.

*

The trip last year offered a sense of closure with this place I’d left so abruptly all those years ago, so I was pleasantly surprised when I was offered the chance to return so soon for a conference.

It’s Wednesday, February 28 and I just landed in Ottawa. I follow a man to the baggage claim as he lugs around a container of fresh lobster. “Siri, call Sarah… Siri, call Sarah… Siri, call Sarah…” he pleads into his Bluetooth earpiece. I rush to the hotel to change before meeting a few colleagues downtown for dinner.

I recently had an interview with a young journalism student who was writing a story about online personas. During our conversation, the student remarked that some young people approached social media as a public portfolio for their work, making their ‘persona’ a product in itself despite a general craving for authenticity.

I wondered what authenticity could really mean in an increasingly stratified world, wherein the self that I present to others depends entirely on the context in which I am meeting them. I wonder about my disparate selves, what it means to be known as only one or the other.

I have been reading Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries, which she created by inputting a decade’s worth of diary entries into an alphabetized spreadsheet. The result is a dreamy and unsettling amalgamation of a self, split across ten years. The first lines of the novel, from chapter A: 

“A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain. A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope, it can have many things that coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by its binding...A kind of tyranny to think about beauty and love all the time, when there is really nothing to think about”

Really nothing to think about. Yet in ten decades of disassembled diary entries, Heti has clear patterns. A few pages in, and men have already made an appearance. In rapid succession:

“A man must part company with the inferior and the superficial. A man of discretion. A man to love. A man who could physically kill me in under a minute is a man who is easy to sleep beside. A man who goes out in the world and gets what he wants for himself. A man who I could have in the center of my life, even a child, and my family could fit themselves into the healthiness and happiness of that. A man who would be mine… A new relation to life. A new relationship, born from the ashes of the old and dead one. A new tone, a new ringtone.”

Apart from a few names that appear periodically, the novel is largely without plot or characters. By shuffling her thoughts, Heti affords herself a remarkable sense of privacy. Suddenly the self becomes obscured behind the distance afforded by the lack of genre. It is autoform, wherein she moulds an entire oeuvre into a new shape to serve a constructive end. I wonder if she could identify the year she wrote every sentence. I wonder if I could too, or if the patterns eventually obscure into nothingness across time. From chapter E:

“Everyone feels bad, everything was ruined, but what if something was also created?… Everyone said how good we looked together. Everyone telling me these days that I look so good. Everything has to be sacrificed for writing. Everything I have done in the last while I have done with Lars in mind--dancing, painting the hall, cleaning out the stairwell. Everything is more beautiful and glittering in my mind than it ever is in real life.”

*

After the conference, a few of us spill out into the pub across the street, the night bleeding into a conversation amongst acquaintances, old and new. A stranger in her fifties asks me if I’ve heard of “this show called Curb Your Enthusiasm?” I shriek, “I love that show!” as we immediately grasp at each other’s hands only to whisper, “Wait, have you heard?” It’s been two days since Richard Lewis passed, and we commiserate over the sudden shocking loss. 

Is life too short? You think it’s too short? It’s too short, isn’t it? 

I speak with the woman for nearly an hour, trading stories about our pets (she had a mouse that had recently passed), our families (she is fascinated by my dad’s history in Chile), and our hometowns (she is from the Atlantic Coast). Someone mentions books, and I ask her what she's been reading lately. Her eyes are already moist as she turns to me sardonically and says, “Charlotte’s Web, with my son. And I cry every. Fucking. Time.”

Eventually, the conversation turns back to the pet mouse she’d recently lost. “The crazy thing is,” she whispers, “I know I’m being irrational. I know it was just a mouse but… I was there, you know? I was there when it passed, and it was a three which was like a lifetime in mouse years, and I just… You feel connected. And to be there when a creature passes just…changes you. You know?”

I nod; I do know. I want to stay close to her forever. “I even went to a counselling circle,” she laughs, “I just needed to shake it off. But then of course I got there and everyone’s there to grieve their dogs, I just felt even worse. Look at me,” she points to herself, “this fool grieving a goddamn mouse.” 

She leans in to me and says, “I don’t know how you could ever let yourself go through that with a dog.” 

*

Later that night I meet up with an old friend of over 23 years. Reconnecting with her for the first time since last summer, I feel like no time has passed. “What were we talking about?” I say, and she already knows what I meant. “That was last summer, right?” she says, “I remember you were still thinking about taking that new job.”

“Oh yeah,” I laugh, “that would be the one I’m in now.” I eat tomato-drenched calamari as we trade stories about the past year. When the waitress brings our cheque, she asks what we’re up to next. “That depends,” I say, “what day is it?” She laughs, “tell me about it.” But I genuinely don’t know. As we step out into the frigid air, I forget for a moment who, where, and what I am.

I tell my friend about the older woman I’d met earlier, the one who had been so betrayed by her own capacity to love a living creature that she vowed to never adopt a pet again.

“I think the grief is already built in, though,” I tell my friend as we make our way back to her place. A few weeks ago, I was so overcome with grief that I thought I might have a panic attack. I caught my breathe in between sobs, and suddenly felt lucid enough to try and sink into the pain of the grief rather than look away from it. In doing so, I began to laugh at how good it felt to bask in the sorrow with unmitigated joy. It was a feeling of acceptance that took four years of grief to alchemize; in the depths of it, I felt all the love that still existed between us.

I explain this all to my friend as we wait outside her apartment. Her dog is leaping all over me, leaving tufts of soft white fur all over my coat. I look into his sweet eyes and laugh, missing my own dog at home as he tries to lick my face.

The grief is already built in. If given the chance I would still take the grief. Every time.

*

I pay for an extra night at the hotel so that I can spend Friday in the city alone. The sun has finally emerged and it feels like a crisp spring day outside. I venture back to the bookstore cafe where I overheard the couple fighting last year. I sit next to another couple, this time on a first date. The young man flirts with the woman across from him by asking if she uses Snapchat.

“I know some people who break up but keep Snapping so they can keep their streak,” he says.

“Wow, that’s soo crazy,” she says. “Yeah, Snapchat’s crazy,” he agrees. “So, you use Insta, then?” He teases her, asking if she’ll post a story about him after their date.

“Wanna go look at books?” he asks, and as they get up to leave he says, “I don’t actually read…it just seemed like something I should ask.” 

I’ve been carrying my laptop across the city with me, but have no energy for creative work. For weeks I’ve been waiting to finally have time and space to write, and now that I have it I don’t know what to do with it. Two women are seated next to me, complaining about another friend’s boyfriend. “I should’ve trusted my initial vibes,” the blonde says to the brunette.

I close my laptop and call an Uber for the National Gallery. I have to go see Maman. 

The night before, I’d told a few coworkers from out of town that I would be spending the day with the giant spider outside the gallery. Unfamiliar with her magic, they scrunched up their noses and said, “A spider?”

When I see her again, I wait for the space to clear out before approaching. I touch the edge of her leg, marvelling at the scraps of bronze and steel of which she is mightily composed. A man hovers in the distance taking photos, so I pass him my phone and ask him to take a photo of me standing beneath her.

He seems confused. “Are you from here?” he asks.

I laugh. “Yes and no.” 

Inside the gallery I stop by to see my other favourites: Klimt, Gaugin, Matisse, Rothko. The Jean-Paul Riopelle exhibit featuring a series of work completed after the death of his longtime love Joan Mitchell.

As a teenager visiting the Art Gallery of Ontario for the first time with my dad, I watched him make a beeline for the Picasso portion of the exhibit. “Look, you can still see where he made a mistake and covered it up,” he marvelled at one painting in particular.

Standing alone now, I observe the painting as I’ve done countless times before. I relax my eyes into the pentimento, trying to spot the mistakes. But of course my eyes fall to the signature, the one my father had emulated as a young artist making his way in a new country after being exiled from his own. The one I’d tried to replicate when I signed one of his last paintings on his behalf. My name, marked across time and space.

I stop at the gift shop, helpless to a stack of David Zwirner books on display. When I finally make my way to leave, I turn left and walk straight for a block or two until I come across my old favourite hole-in-the-wall. I sit next to a glamorous young French woman and order a diet coke and escargot.

I take out one of the new books, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Painter, and the French woman turns to ask, “Qu’est-ce que tu as là ?” I show her the others from the same set, pointing her in the direction of the gallery. If we lean out the window, we could probably see Maman from here.

She says she’s from Northern Quebec, but she lives here for school (law). I want to keep talking to her, to crawl into the mop of curly red hair on her head and stay there. The old door clangs open and her friend enters, stealing her attention away for the rest of the night. Last year, in this same restaurant, I wrote:

“I sit with my book in the upper mezzanine and order a glass of white wine and escargot. Sinatra’s New York, New York is playing and the waitress is singing along in a raspy voice, watching herself in the mirror behind me as she takes my order. She is young and has big glasses and a deep voice and after she congratulates me on graduating she bounces back downstairs and launches right into a conversation with a customer about dead old jazz singers. As I leave the restaurant, I’m struck with the realization that all the places I used to go in this city were always much closer to each other than I ever realized. Different people meeting in different places in a different time, and it’s all so far away now.”

The waitress arrives with my bill, and I realize that she is the same waitress that I wrote about last year. She seems too frazzled by the happy hour rush to chat. I wish she was still singing. 

*

The next morning I am back at the airport by 5 am to head home. The security line loops around a few times, and the woman in front of me is tentatively flirting with the man across the rope every time their spots line up. “Nadine, right?” he asks. She blushes and nods, asking him where he’s working these days. “Still in cyber,” he says. “Where you off to next?” she asks. “California,” he responds. 

“Oh cool. With your family, or…” she fishes. “No, just alone.” “Oh shit, well, I’m off to New York, but if you’re not busy…uh, want to grab a coffee?” she asks. He smiles back, rubbing the sleep from his eye. 

“I can’t wait to be home,” I tell L over the phone while I wait to board. It’s 6 am on Saturday morning where he is. He says it’s been so quiet without me there that he’s started having hours-long conversations with our dog just to stay sane. I smile at the older couple next to me, and as they shuffle nervously onto the plane they sit together, only to be separated when the other customers realize they’re in the wrong seats. Everyone continues to talk about the couple, who don’t speak English, in the third person. “I don’t think they understand he’s in the wrong seat,” his seat mates say. “Sir, you need to move,” they try to explain. “My wife,” he keeps saying, “I sit with her.” Eventually he moves to the row behind her, leaving her between two strangers. 

Once we take off, I try again to write, fighting with the wifi for half an hour to no avail. I feel my deadlines closing in on me, that old familiar sense of dysfunction I call The Wall. The baby across the aisle has been screaming on and off for an hour when I hear the woman behind me snap at the man’s wife, “If you don’t stop, I’ll have to call the flight attendant.”

The flight attendant arrives, patiently catching up to the situation. The passenger accuses the other woman of opening her purse and stealing her blanket. The woman cannot speak English to defend herself. “I’m so sick,” the passenger coughs through her mask. Over the sound of the baby’s wails she cries, “I just can’t fucking deal right now, I can’t fucking deal…” By this point, the pressure on the plane was reaching a fever pitch. With zero visibility heading into a prairie snowstorm, zero wifi, and a mounting sense of desperation, everyone in the vicinity agrees to swap seats to separate the two women and return the husband to his wife. 

I’ve given up on writing at this point, panic setting in as I try to capture fleeting thoughts in the notes app instead. I figure if I’m going to experience ego death, it may as well be on an overcrowded Air Canada flight to my hometown.

The pilot tells us to prepare for landing, but remarks that if the visibility is too bad we will have to turn around and land in a neighbouring province instead. We have about fifteen minutes to find out which it will be. In the pitch white, I feel my ears pop and my stomach drop. The young German boy in front of me screeches out, “I see it! I see land!” and a few seconds later the runaway emerges and the wheels hit the ground. The plane erupts in applause and we spill out and into the arms of our loved ones. My luggage emerges broken and snow-covered from the baggage claim but I am just so grateful to be home that I cannot find it in me to care. I turn on my cellphone’s internet, and as the iCloud syncs I see that the notes I’d hastily typed from the plane have transmogrified with the notes from earlier that morning:

“where you off to?” “california” “with your family or…” “by myself” “oh shit well, i’m off to new york so… if you’re not… grab a coffee?” the people around the man and with his wife who’ve been smiling at me, talking about them in third person. “i don’t think they understand. he’s in the wrong seat,” he just wants to sit next to his wife. “sir, you’ll need to move.” “my wife,” he says, “i sit with her.” she points to the distance and he says sure, they flirt a bit anxiously across the security line. “where are you working these days,” etc. “cyber.” “it’s nadine, right?”

I collapse onto my bed at home, emptying my pockets of the remnants from the trip. My gallery ticket falls onto the bed and I wonder for the umpteenth time whether I should have been collecting them all along, or if the memories will be enough. For now, I hope that they will be.