Eating as I Go: Scenes from America and Abroad

MY OWN MUERTOS

219 Leonia,฀New฀Jersey,฀1991฀and฀2000 Just a few days before he died in August 1991, Eli asked me what I was planning for his funeral. He was sitting in the big round chair in my study, rail thin in his warm-up suit, his dense curly hair gone with the chemo. We were drinking coffee, and I had swiveled my desk chair around to face him. Of course, the funeral was on our list of items to deal with. Over the past few months, we had reorganized our finances and rewritten our wills. After reading Derek Humphry’s A Final Exit, about end-of-life choices, we collected a stash of pills. Many mornings, when the sun streamed into the dining room, we discussed the needs of the house; we talked about the two exhibits of Eli’s paintings that were in the works. Many evenings after turning off the lights we reviewed, in whispers and tears, segments of our twenty-four-year romance. Still, his blunt “What are you planning?” caught me by surprise. Was Eli going to leave the concluding round of arrangements entirely to me? Or did he believe I had already made some decisions but couldn’t bring myself to tell him? As it turned out, I had misinterpreted his question. Often my husband would open a discussion by grilling me on my views. “It clarifies my thinking,” he would tell me, as we dove into politics or the domestic dilemma of the day. While I generally got off to a quick start, he was the more logical, passionate, and tenacious debater. He didn’t need to win. He simply craved the mental gymnastics. In the matter of the funeral, however, it took less than thirty minutes for us to agree on the essentials: a minimalist Jewish frame and comments by two close friends and three family members. Constructing a public farewell didn’t hold much fascination for Eli. Not because the cancer had utterly exhausted him, although it had. Rather, he was more invested in private farewells and in the unfinished business of his career. In the summer of 1990, just a year before he died, Eli completed the text for an illustrated volume on his work, entitled “The Secrets of Elias Friedensohn.” The book, under contract with a French publisher, probed his intentions as an artist, his craft, and the zeitgeist that informed each phase of his artistic production . Enamoured of language almost as much as he was enamoured of painting, MY฀OWN฀MUERTOS฀ EATING ALONE 220 Eli savored each day’s writing—week after week for a solid nine months. More than he was willing to let on, Eli cared about his legacy as an artist. The living take charge of the memory of the dead. It was Jackie, after all, who created Camelot. Although I haven’t attempted to reinvent Eli, each time I explain one of his paintings or arrange an exhibit, I am in an interpretive mode. “The Secrets of Elias Friedensohn,” unpublished as a consequence of a scandal at his publishers, are mine to disseminate. In the years since Eli’s death, I have been a part-time custodian of his legacy, readying paintings for shows proposed by friends and colleagues and putting together exhibits in the studio that is attached to our house. My efforts in the studio, while professional in appearance, are, for me, not about enhancing Eli’s reputation in the art world. Rather, they are occasions to revisit the work and remember the man—and to celebrate with friends and family. In December 2000, after a month’s stay in Patzcuaro, a small city in central Mexico , I installed a different sort of show in the studio, and I invited twenty-five close friends to a viewing and dinner. The purpose of the event was to engineer an encounter between Eli’s death paintings and the Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos, celebrated on All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day (November 1 and 2). The idea for this encounter dates back to November 1998, when I joined my cousin Marlene, a teacher of Spanish and collector of Mexican folk art, in Oaxaca. “Bring bright colors,” Marlene had advised. “Your black pants and sweaters are fine, but you’ll want to be in synch with the vividness of the holiday.” Indeed, all over the city, bright orange marigolds, red coxcombs, and a...