I thought that on the other side of Georg’s memorial, everything would be light and peachy; that tons of weight would be lifted off my shoulders, and all would be right in my world.

Ha. Think again, Missy. I have actually had a major resurgence of grief. Perhaps it was seeing so many old friends, and realizing just how many people Georg touched through his art, his cooking, his teaching. There are so many people who have a deep story about what he meant to them. He was my dad, sure, but he was a lot of other things to a lot of other people. And I got a big dose of that this past weekend.

I have been having new instances of forgetting for a milli-second that Georg is dead. This hadn’t happened for many weeks. But now, after having been on his home turf for a few days, I am once again almost forgetting that he is not alive anymore. Perhaps this is why it is called a memorial. I wake up thinking, “I should call Dad this morning.” Actually, I get to “I should ca…” and then I remember that he is not in a calling area that I can access with cell phone or land line. Would tin cans work?

Or last night, cooking dinner. I had some ubiquitous onions frying in the pan, along with some eggplant, carrots, and cabbage. I poured some soy sauce on the vegetables and the pan made that great hissing sound and a small cloud of steam wafted a salty sweet smell to my hungry nose and for half an instant, I thought, “Ooh! I should call Georg and tell him about my stir fry that I’m making.”

There are no frying pans where Georg is.

At least, I don’t think there are.

I am just sad. Just sad. There is no getting around it. I will be sad for a while. Even though I have moved everything out of the studio into storage, and even though I have a really good start on his new website. I still have so much more to do to settle his estate. But, all this activity is not what is making me and keeping me sad.

I am sad because his physical being is not here. His smile, his attention, his cooking, his inquisitiveness, his unconditional love of his daughters and grandchildren and friends, his dedication to himself. He was a very good role model for being a dedicated artist. He was such a force of nature, my dad. I miss him. How many times can I say this?

I had planned to post some pictures today from the memorial that our friend, Zabel Belian, kindly took. But, I left the disk on my desk at work. I will have to post the pictures tomorrow or over the weekend. Until then, I will stick to words. They are all I have right now. Words and more words. And tears. Lots and lots of tears. 

I am writing this post from the lobby of the Holiday Inn Express in Troy, Michigan, so I may rush and I may not find all the right words to articulate just what transpired at the memorial. But I will try.

Yesterday, we had the most incredible experience, honoring Georg at The Roeper School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. I hugged my cousins, a new baby in the family (beautiful little Alessandra) and many, many old friends. I met friends of Georg’s I had heard about for years but had never met and I saw old friends of our family that I had not seen since I was a small girl.  I met the new head of the school, David Feldman (who had never met Dad, but set the context for our celebration so well) and sat next to a Greek priest, Father Theodor, who had also never met Georg, but listened to what we all said about him and gestalted the most wonderful closing remarks. He then sang a prayer in Greek and English that made me cry. It was a day of perfect magic; just what Georg would have ordered.

In the front lobby of the Hill House where we gathered, our dear friend Jarie Ruddy who teaches art in the lower grades at Roeper had installed the work of her Stage II students (this equates to about kindergarten age-1st grade, if I remember my Roeper stage theory correctly). Jarie had made Georg’s feathers the subject of inquiry for her students. They learned about Georg, looked at his feather images, looked at real feathers with magnifying glasses and then created their own feather images with pastels on black paper. The front hall was covered in feathers. Probably 50 of them, maybe more.

When I first walked into the building to set up for the memorial, I was greeted by feathers made by little hands. It took my breath away and brought tears to my eyes. Scattered throughout the installation were explanations of what the students had done, information about Georg, and quotes by the children. One in particular struck me. I don’t remember the child’s name, and I may be paraphrasing or conflating two quotes that were next to each other. Here is the gist:

“I love the feathers of Georg because they are like light. They glow.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country in Bend, Oregon, my dearest dear friend, Carolyn Graham Tsuneta, created a special altar for Georg, listened to Greek music throughout the day, and was witness to a vision of Georg art in the sky. She couldn’t make the journey to Detroit, but she and her mom honored Georg for us at a satellite location. Here is what she wrote about the sky over Bend yesterday:

The sky was UNBELIEVABLE today. I went out to walk Ziggy this afternoon and it was a GEORG VIHOS SKY. The clouds were EXACTLY, and I mean EXACTLY like one of your dad’s drawings. It was a HUGE section of the sky just covered with Georg energy …it gave me chills to realize that even his biggest pieces made on earth will never equal what he is now capable of creating in the sky. Talk about an INFINITE CANVAS! I honestly don’t know what to believe about life and death any more. Sometimes I long for the certainty of the atheists who proclaim, “Dead is dead. Life is for the living.” But I see something like the shape of the clouds in the sky today and all I do is wonder.

There is much to wonder about, and much to be grateful for, and still so much to do.
I’ll be home soon.

Today is Georg’s birthday. He is/would have been 77.

Months and months ago, my sister and I planned that around the time of Georg’s birthday, we would hold a memorial celebration of his life in the Detroit area with his many friends, students, collectors, and associates. We first thought we might hold the event at the butterfly garden at the Detroit Zoo, since he loved butterflies so much. But, that proved to be a bit out of our price range.

Then Illia got the brilliant idea that we should hold the memorial at The Roeper School, where she and I attended for all our growing up years and my mom and dad both taught art. My mom was my first art teacher. My dad was my first art history teacher. It was/still is a wonderful school, a school for gifted children built upon a philosophy of humanism that puts the student at the center of the curriculum. We could study what we wanted to study (within reason). We called most of our teachers by their first names, (except my 7th grade algebra teacher. He was always Mr. Morrow. I loved Mr. Morrow. He made algebra an art). We learned to respect other people and also ourselves. It was/still is an amazing community of learners and teachers.

When I went there, it was Roeper City and Country School, but it has since changed its name to simply, The Roeper School. It was founded by George and Anna Marie Roeper in 1941. They were two Germans (Anna Marie was Jewish) who had escaped Nazi Germany just before things got really bad. They first founded a school on the east coast before coming to Bloomfield Hills, Michigan to found Roeper. The school now has two campuses, the original one, and another campus for the upper school in nearby Birmingham.

Georg and Anna Marie have both passed on. The school still exists and is thriving. Yesterday, a boy who went to that school for many years (WAY after my time) won a Gold Medal in the Olympics. Charlie White. Maybe you have heard of him. Roeper School supported and made room for every kind of gift that a child brought to the table. I never met Charlie, but my mom had him in art. She remembers kids sometimes teasing him because he was always running out to skate practice with that girl. Ah, children. You see what practice can get you. I feel like he is my little brother. I’m very proud of him.

George taught there about 6 years, I think. This would have been from about 1971 to 1977. He created a big stir when he advocated for having live models (yes nude) for his senior high schoolers to draw from. He won. Along with teaching studio art and art history, Georg instituted a Thursday afternoon bread baking club. A bunch of kids would stay after school and bake about 40 loaves of bread, enough to feed the student body at Friday’s lunch.

My mom taught there for 40 years and is now retired. She touched so many students lives. I need to dedicate an entire blog post to her some day, and I will.

Illia started there in three-year-old nursery and left when she graduated high school. I went there from 1968 until 1977, when (silly me) I graduated a year early because I was in such a rush to get on with life. Any high school students out there reading this, take my advice. Slow down. I also got married there in 1993 and had my wedding reception in the lunchroom of Hill House, the same place we will have the memorial in five short days. So, you could say that the Vihos family has a bit of history at this place.

Illia and I have been thinking about this day for the longest time and now it is almost upon us. I am a bit apprehensive about the whole thing. Being at a place so rich in memories, seeing so many old friends. What will I say to them? Part of me does not want to rehash the last year and how torturous it was for me to watch Dad gradually fail. I don’t want to listen to their sadness. I have my own grief to contend with.

But, this is a very selfish attitude and totally “not Georg.” If Georg was at my memorial service with a lot of sad people, he would want to listen to them, comfort them, invite them over for a meal. I won’t be able to invite people over (unless they want to come all the way to Sheboygan some time. I mean it is awfully pretty around here even in the dead of winter), but I can certainly slow down and be nice to them. I can listen to them share their pain.

Speaking of winter, I think Georg did the right thing by skipping this winter. He would have been absolutely miserable this winter with the extreme cold, the mountains of snow, and the many sunless days. And just when it seems like maybe things are getting a little better, a little sunnier, a little warmer, BOOM. A hand comes crashing down on the table. Back inside people!

I want to boycott winter until summer returns. I want to move slowly and mindfully through the coming week. I want to be gracious with my father’s friends, many of whom I really do not know all that well and many whom I do. I just haven’t seen them since I was a teenager. After Saturday, it is/will have been a very good celebration of Georg’s life. Everything is going to be all right. It already is. I know that.

Happy birthday, Dad. It is not Thursday right now, but I am doing all these things for you. For all of us. Practice. I will practice living a good life, even if you are not here to guide me any more. Love, Lisa

Oh my. Yesterday was the first Thursday since Georg died that I did not post. I literally forgot the significance of Thursday. I was busy as usual this past week, but up until now, no matter how busy I was on a Wednesday night, I had always made a point to start readying a post for the next morning. Not this week. I remember thinking about it on Tuesday or so, and then the whole thing just slipped my mind as I got involved in a myriad of other things.

I suppose this is a good sign. This means that I am not brooding over my father’s death and religiously locking myself into feeling his absence on Thursdays, on every Thursday for the rest of my life. What a waste of Thursdays that would be!

So, now it is Friday. The end of the week. I should be happy. Tomorrow, though, I will continue to work on moving everything out of Georg’s studio into a smaller storage space, luckily in the same building. This move has been hard for me. It is just physically overwhelming, even with strong-armed helpers. There is a lot of large, heavy art. But, more than that, it is emotionally very difficult. I feel like I am taking 76 years of life, of my dad’s very large and exuberant life, and cramming it all into a room that is 25 x 16 feet. It doesn’t feel very good. I feel like I am putting him and his brilliance into a tomb. It is heart breaking, really.

We began the process last Saturday and got a good start. My son Owen was with me and was a huge help, as were my friends Rob and Felix. At one point, Owen and I were moving a tall utility shelf out of our way, and a long metal tube rolled off the top of the shelf and hit us both on the head. I immediately burst into tears. It hurt. It was also scary. (I literally did not know at first what had hit me. Was it a pipe? An axe? A javelin?) And in some strange way, it was also humiliating. Why is the Universe bonking me on the head when I am trying so hard to take care of things for my dad?

Owen said, “why are you crying, Mom? I got hit too. It didn’t hurt that much.” Then he patted my shoulder very compassionately.

Oh, from the mouths of teens. He was right. It did not hurt that much. It was just very startling. And, it reminded me of the enormity of what we are doing. Rob said to me later, “Lisa, you cannot expect to make sense of you dad’s life in a month, or even three months. You are doing everything right. It is going to take a long, long time, but you will do it.”

Oh, from the mouths of wise friends. Everyone sees what is going on here, but sometimes I do not. I am grieving. I may appear happy now and then, and I may forget that it is Thursday, (or any day of the week without Georg), but underneath it all, I am very sad that my wonderful and amazing father is gone. Never to return.

Well now, just a minute there, Missy. Think again.

Every time I cook up a yummy dinner for a small group of friends (like I did last Saturday night), my dad is there. Every time I go to a museum, my dad is at my side. Every time I put pen to paper to write a poem. Dad. Look at Lake Michigan or any large body of water? Dad. See a flock of starlings? Dad. Fry up a pan of onions? Of course, Dad. Dad is everywhere and nowhere. My dad is gone but he is right here, and he will be that way for me forever, no matter what day of the week it is, and no matter what hurtful and startling things may fall upon my head.

Thanks, Dad. Happy Valentines Day. I am one day late with this blog post, but I know you are here and I know you are not counting.

Maybe it is just the cold and the snow, but I have become infinitely tired of late. No matter how much sleep I get, how well I eat, how mindful I am about everything going on in my life, I feel exhausted. I am not sure what’s up. I do have a lot of things I am trying to do related to organizing Georg’s world. I am trying to get all this stuff moved into a more appropriate storage space (where it will still be accessible), build him a new website, have a memorial for him in Detroit. What else? Is that not enough?

For a while there, I was feeling like a lot of progress was being made. When progress was being made, (or when I perceived progress), I felt better. Right now, I feel mired in too much to do. This happens. The only cure is to keep doing things. It is difficult sometimes, to keep the spirits up when the blanket of overwhelm sets in. But, I really have no choice. Most importantly, I know Dad would not want me to stress about these things.

I keep thinking about the far distant future. What will happen to all his art and other stuff when I am not here to take care of it? But, that is not a helpful question. I cannot ask that question right now. What will happen to anything when I am not here to take care of it?

Right now, just take care of what I can take of. That is really all I can ever do.

Ode to Onion

O Onion!

Teach me the geometry
of your kind. Teach me

your Vidalian logic
so that I may know

how to peel back the layers
toward infinity. Let me know

the wisdom of earth’s root bulb.
May goodness come to me, carmelized.

Let us lay ourselves
in rings upon any meal,

bring fresh diced zest
to all Coney dogs by the sea.

May we cry when they cut into us.
May our paper thin skins

protect these pearly hearts.
May our scent precede us, and then,

may it linger on the wind
long after we go.