When I first began to do art therapy with hospice patients, my heart would beat like so many butterflies against a window pane every time I stood before the door of a dying person’s house. I was afraid, not knowing what I might find. I have now come to experience this feeling as my own fear of dying, of stepping into that great unknown. Once across the threshold, I let myself go with whatever is to unfold, and it is a wonderfully liberating experience each time, and very exciting to watch the images begin to appear on the paper as we become involved in the art work together.

The first patient I saw was so emaciated and crippled that I had no idea how to even get started with him. Ralph could hardly speak and could barely lift things with the one hand he could still use. “Perhaps he can’t do this,” I thought, and mentally threw out the window all the things I’d studied about art therapy, since none of it seemed appropriate right then. More than anything I might have had in mind, it seemed that what was needed was to be really present with this person, in love and respect, and to go with whatever would come of that. I saw that he seemed willing to try it, so I put a felt pen in his unsteady hand and answered his puzzled look by suggesting he just move it over the paper in whatever way seemed easy.

Out of these first uncertain lines wavering over the paper emerged a landscape of sorts, and, at the end, after a sudden concentrated effort, a bright golden sun appeared over the horizon. I asked him if it was coming up or going down, and he uttered with conviction, “Coming up!” This, coming from a man so debilitated, and who had been hanging between life and death for many months, moved me to the depth of my being.

We did many drawings after this and even began to paint as he gained more confidence and control over his hand. Sometimes it came hard, sometimes happily and easily, and we would both laugh with delight: a vegetable garden, a rabbit, the orange cat next door, an expansive Carmen Miranda with luscious fruit all over her head. These creations seemed like small miracles to me, special, unexpected gifts.

On his fiftieth birthday, Ralph painted a birthday cake. “What would you wish for your birthday?” I asked. In his nearly unintelligible speech, Ralph grunted, “Be happy, don’t worry.” My heart bloomed with him that day. I felt that I had been given the birthday gift. That someone in his condition could feel in that way was a real teaching for me. I wrote his wish under the cake and hung it on the wall.

The last thing we did was to make butterflies—I did not know then that he was to die soon afterwards. When I hung them over his bed, he had the most profound look in his eyes as he looked at them, and I wondered why.

I grieved over him when he died; his dying gave me the deepest sense of connectedness I had yet had with him. I don’t know how to describe that profoundly moving, awesome feeling when someone you know goes through that kind of transition, and I won’t try. I think it is one of the deepest experiences one can have. In my meditation with him, he appeared in my mind as a huge, gorgeous butterfly flying into that bright sun he had drawn on that first day. I have the feeling that he is alright, but I miss our sessions together and that close, nonverbal communication that had grown between us over the months.

The most intensely transforming experience I witnessed happened with a man who was not only very emaciated but also nearly blind. At first when I entered his living room, it seemed as if all my fears of the horribleness of death had come true because the atmosphere was black and depressing, and the man on the couch seemed more like a ghost than a person to me. I sat down and soon realized that, for now, he merely wanted to talk.

He had been considering euthanasia, he said. Things were too depressing—he could not see how he could go on—there simply wasn’t any future for him—everyone wanted to dissuade him from it—what did I think? So I tried to give him plenty of space to consider this as a real option, a well-considered option. “Have you thought of where you might be going when you do this?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice trailing away vaguely. “The Great Beyond, I suppose.” When his social worker came in, we talked about it some more, and she promised to send him some information on it through the mail.

Then suddenly he said, “Let’s paint!” So we got ourselves to the kitchen table and all three of us proceeded to paint. Of the three paintings he did that day, the last one was the crucial one. It seemed to be one of outer space: some Chagall-like animals in the sky, and a planet, surrounded by glitter. On this planet was the figure of a small boy; he asked me to guide his hand so he could put a golden crown on his head, as he could not really see it. “Why,” I said, “this looks like The Little Prince!” “It is,” he said. “And what is this square golden thing on the ground?” I asked. “It is the generator that gives you the energy to travel through space,” he answered.

I was speechless. This man, who moments before was in the depths of depression, seemed on another, deeper level to be looking forward to his approaching cosmic journey as a great and wonderful adventure (as anyone who knows the book The Little Prince would recognize). I took him by the arm and was surprised at the emotion in my voice. “With all this richness inside,” I said, “do you really think you have nothing to live for?”

He did more painting after that, even when I was not there. I came once more, and we painted, but he seemed very tired. Two weeks later, when I called, he had just died a few hours before, naturally and peacefully, his partner told me on the phone. We talked for a while, his voice a mixture of love, pain and grief; he was weeping. I was profoundly moved. I felt such a deeply loving bond with them through all of this, although I hardly even knew them, and had seen them only a few times.

These episodes are unforgettable, and I am very grateful to have been a part of them. Each art therapy session I have is so very different and unique. These dying people seem to be my teachers, reflecting back to me my darknesses and fears and bringing me closer to the heart of life. I have come to see that the dying process, like the creative process, is an uncontrollable mystery, taking its own, unpremeditated path, leaving images behind on paper that speak of hope and healing and of the ongoingness of life.

∞

From the Winter/Spring 1990 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 6, No. 2)

Text © 1990–2022 by Augusta Lucas-Andreae

This article was first published in the monthly newsletter of The Hospice by the Bay, 1550 Sutter Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, CA 94109.