Pictures At An Exhibition

I read an article in the Washington Post this morning about a new exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery that I’m certain to see. It’s a series of nine pencil sketches, accompanied by audio clips, called “Thoughts in Passing.” All of the subjects were in hospice care when their likenesses were drawn. The story of each senior citizen’s life and impending death literally is written into his or her clothing, and is amplified in an accompanying audio clip.

It’s the work of Claudia Bicen, a 29-year-old self-taught artist who was born in Britain but lives and works in the San Francisco area. The oeuvre couldn’t be any more in my wheelhouse, given that I’ve visited with the very elderly for nearly two decades now (I write “very” to distinguish them from me at this stage of my life), and given that I’ve been a hospice volunteer. The invisibility of the elderly in our society deeply saddens me, as does the isolated anonymity of their death in so many cases. I vastly enjoy learning who they are, who they were, and what they make of a world so very different from the one they once knew.

In the article, Bicen says, “I wanted to create a feeling of compassion and empathy, of seeing yourself in that person.” That line really struck me, because I do see something of myself in every elderly person I’ve come to know and befriend over the years. And I don’t just mean that I recognize that I, too, may one day face the same physical and/or cognitive issues with which they grapple. What I see are the various points of intersection they and I have—the cultural references we share, the likes and dislikes, the nostalgia for people and things that no longer exist.

I was a hospice volunteer for only about 18 months, up until I moved to Washington, DC, in late 1992 from Savannah, Georgia. But those were rich months, filled with memorable experiences. I helped one terminally ill man sneak a smoke, for example, and took another on a manic grocery spree. I’ll never forget, either, the time when an octogenarian widower told me, out of the blue, that what he hated worst was that his “pecker” no longer got hard. Which brings to mind another thing Bicen says: “I went into this thinking that every person was going to provide me with some kind of wisdom. But people die as themselves. There isn’t going to necessarily be some kind of revelation or change. This it it.”

Isn’t that enough, though? Clearly Bicen thinks so. I do, too. True, not everyone is profound. But everyone has a story. That simple truth can, and too often does, get lost when we enter an assisted living facility, nursing home or hospice house and are greeted by a sea of infirm bodies, blasting TVs and medicinal smells that generically shout “old people.” But man, can those old people be uniquely interesting! And funny. And lewd. And angry. And bitter. And maddening. And philosophical. And more or less content—or damn tired of it all. Each in his or her own way.

But that’s only part of what I want to say today. Lately death not only hasn’t taken a holiday, but it’s practically been living with me. I just got back Sunday from a group remembrance in Greensboro, North Carolina, for a high school friend of mine who killed herself last summer after a decades-long battle with depression. The very next day came the news that a long-ago newspaper colleague of mine had died of lung cancer. The first woman was my exactly age, 57. The second was not much older, 64.

As I’ve noted before in this space, for whatever reason—maybe some combination of my appreciation of impermanence, fascination with darkness and utter cluelessness as to what if anything comes next—death has been an oft-visited theme in the six years I’ve been doing this blog. I’ve written of my love of the true-crime Investigation Discovery cable television channel, with its gruesome details and cheesy reenactments. I’ve drafted eulogies to the famous and infamous upon their entry into the Big Sleep. I’ve sketched my own portraits—literary ones—of some of the seniors I befriended very late in their lives. Just a few blog posts back, I announced plans for a “Dead of Winter” tour that would encompass the gravesites of a couple of those women. (It didn’t happen, but I may get to one of those burial sites very soon. Stay tuned!)

In the June 2, 2012, post about my Investigation Discovery obsession (“Grim-Reality TV”), I listed some of the homicide sites past which I regularly run near my Bethesda home and in the District—benign-looking homes in which individuals or entire families have been slain, and, in one case, a neighborhood from which a woman disappeared, never to be seen again.

Well, recently I ran, for perhaps the hundredth time, past a peculiar death site that I hadn’t mentioned in 2012. But think I will now, since I’m on the subject.

There’s a lovely little tableau on a far corner of the Georgetown University campus that memorializes with a plaque the 20-year lifespan of David A. Shick. His name means nothing to today’s Hoyas, though he was one of them not so very long ago. The junior from Connecticut died in February 2000 after an altercation in the school library’s parking lot between two groups of drunk students. Shick was punched, fell, hit his head on concrete, and died three days later at Georgetown University Medical Center. It was ruled a homicide, but charges were not pursued, given the unlikelihood of conviction. Shick himself, after all, had been a fist-wielding participant in the mayhem.

Per the school newspaper The Hoya, on October 11, 2000, “The David Shick Memorial was dedicated in front of a group of about 150 students, faculty and family members on what would have been Shick’s 21st birthday. His parents were joined in prayer by University President Leo J O’Donovan while an a capella group performed.”

The memorial, funded by the Friends of David Shick, is described in the piece as including “a small pond stocked with fish, flowers, stonework, shrubbery and two cascading waterfalls.” A family friend told The Hoya that the memorial was meant to serve as both a tribute and a warning—a reminder of the tragedy that foolish behavior can cause. “The running stream symbolizes the waters of chaos,” was how President O’Donovan rather eloquently put it. “The waters of the River of Jordan and their healing quality. The baptismal font and waters of life.”

Sixteen years later, the memorial remains a lovely and tranquil site. I’m not sure, though, that its presence is meeting the stated purpose of “facilitat[ing] the continued retelling of David’s story among future generations, so that they will have the opportunity to internalize those lessons.” It would have a better chance of doing that if an addendum to the plaque were to read “Victim of a drunken fight. Think about that before you booze and brawl.”

Still, as someone who had read the newspaper story when the incident happened and subsequently doubled down on the details online, I can assure the Friends of David Shick that I indeed think of their son, their sibling, their friend every time I run past the memorial. No, I didn’t know the guy. He might have been a great kid. He just as easily might have been a rich, entitled asshole. I have no idea. What I do know is that he was a real person who many people loved, and that he died in an incredibly stupid way. Like the hospice dwellers in Claudia Bicen’s sketches and the scores of elderly people I’ve known, David Shick had his own unique story.

As did Franklin Manzaneres and Gradys Mendoza, whose lives still are commemorated, nearly six years after I first blogged about them, with makeshift crosses near where they plummeted to their death in July 2009.

I wrote on August 12, 2000, in a post titled “The Fallen,” of how I’d seen the crosses near a highway overpass, read the names on them, and decided to see what I could find out online about the deceased. I learned that they were the victims of an infamous drunk-driving case about which I’d read the previous summer. Their car had been forced off the Beltway by a woman who’d had several too many drinks at a Bethesda restaurant.

Mendoza, I’d learned, was a 39-year-old Honduran immigrant who’d made good in America, rising from restaurant worker to owner of his own construction company. He lived in Springfield, Virginia, was married and had three kids. Manzaneres, his friend, was 37. The Internet otherwise is silent on him. He was the passenger, Mendoza the driver when a Jeep Cherokee driven by 33-year-old Kelli Loos rammed Mendoza’s truck, sending it through a guardrail and down a 60-foot ravine very near where those crosses now stand. Loos kept driving, crossing the nearby American Legion Bridge into Virginia, where she crashed and registered a blood-alcohol level of .20—more than twice the legal limit.

The reason I mention this now is the Kelli Loos recently was back in the news.

The last line of my blog post in 2000 was this: “I can’t imagine ever again running past the site without thinking about two men on their last ride, a grieving widow, three fatherless kids, a convicted killer with a lifetime of guilt coiled cancer-like in her chest, and a bereaved old Army man living out the rest of his days missing the Honduran man he loved like a son.”

As it turned out, I had discounted the power of addiction, while overestimating the power of guilt. After serving four years of a 10-year jail sentence, Loos was paroled in 2013 and permitted to resume driving if she blew into a device that would prevent her car from starting were she to be legally drunk. Per a story published in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago, Loos was ordered back to prison after having failed the interlock test at least three times.

The article quoted an “exasperated” Montgomery County Circuit Court judge as telling Loos, who now is 40, “I don’t know what to do with you. I truly don’t.” This was after Loos recanted her story that a breath mint somehow had triggered the interlock.

Loos expressed deep remorse at the recent court appearance, as she had upon her initial sentencing in 2009. She told the judge that she continues to make “poor decisions” because “I’m an alcoholic.”

But if that judge doesn’t know what to do with Kelli Loos other than send her back to jail, Maryland lawmakers do. She’s now a poster drunk for pending legislation that seeks to lower the state’s interlock-activating blood-alcohol level from a surprising .15—well above the legal limit—to the legal limit of .08. The bill is given a good chance of passing, boosted by the high-profile recent death of a law enforcement officer who was run down by a drunk driver while he approached a different drunk driver he’d just pulled over.

If I can briefly editorialize, I’m not personally sure why the interlock threshold isn’t .00—a single drop of alcohol on your breath and this car sits idle. But then, I’m not a state legislator who’s apparently sitting snugly in the back pocket of the liquor industry.

Anyway. I hope the path I’ve taken to get here hasn’t seemed too strained, but when I saw that article this morning about the art exhibit, it presented a way to link together the various thoughts about death that were on my mind. To die, one must first have lived. Everyone dies, so that’s uniform. But lives are infinitely varied. Because of that, there are pieces of every one of the dead in all of us.

I mourn my friends who died, with whom I shared time and space.

I wonder what David Shick was all about, what he might have become, and even what idiotic argument proved fatal to him.

I think about Gradys Mendosa living a life he couldn’t have imagined growing up in Central America, then losing it in an instant.

I see Kelli Loos, committer of vehicular homicide, back in her cell—safely removed from society but never safe from herself.

“See yourself in that person,” Claudia Bicen urges. As someone who went to school with, worked with, and befriended those who now are dead, and as a man who more times than once has driven a car when he really shouldn’t have, I  hardly can do otherwise.