THE CATHARTIC LIGHT

Photo by Shena Driscoll Salvato

Exactly ten years and three days before that fateful day, he was driving the two of us through that same intersection, under the same light in our first car, our unexpected transfer from home to hospital where we would return home between the chicory as three: our fresh, new blessing securely strapped in the back seat, me, her new mother, by her side. Oh the gratitude that it hadn’t happened on that day.

“I always look left before turning right on red there,” a public comment asserted below an image captured without permission in the aftermath of someone’s most vulnerable, fragile moment— stains of leaked fluid on the asphalt, shattered glass shimmering in the summer sun, emergency vehicles captured, still and silent, in the frame. Though I wanted to, I didn’t have the energy to right the wrong of something already so wrong: that he wasn’t turning right on red, that he had the right of way, that someone heading north had run the red light in a 55 mph zone.

I can’t help but think about it each time I pass under that light now: thanking my lucky stars he was alone, that the seatbelt and the airbags and his well cared-for body had saved him, that some form of the divine had intervened. How I didn’t have a sense that it had happened, less than ten miles away under the bluebird sky, still baffles me. I thought myself to be more in tune than that, but surely feeling any sign of impact in my heart or gut would have knocked me to my knees. Less than a mile down the hill, the ambulance had to have raced by. Were its lights on? Were the sirens blaring? I wouldn’t know. Even if the sound could’ve traveled that far, been carried on the summer breeze up the valley like the soaring hawks, I was gleefully listening to the music I had just experienced live from the stage the night before, in that place where he was headed through that intersection to meet our young children to dance and play, the place he never made it to (did I say thank God he was alone?), reveling in my rare time alone as a mother, joyously cleaning our kitchen.

How could it have been 9:11 when he called? Did I look at the time when the phone rang or had I only seen it in the photo I had taken to capture the hospital phone number? How could it have happened so many hours before and I didn’t even know? At least I had heard about it directly from him, from the hospital landline that came up on the caller ID. It was his voice. The van was totaled. He was taken by ambulance to the trauma center. He needed fresh clothes because his had been cut off and were covered in broken glass. He was speaking. He was alive. He needed fresh clothes.

The next day, when I passed under that very same light, through that very same intersection as a passenger, to crawl inside and gather what I could salvage from inside the crumpled metal, I didn’t know it then, but the healing had begun. There was no way to avoid the light; instead, I could only pass through it, invite what it had to teach me.

Just one year after that day, we would all travel under that light together, to go out on the lake for the first time, and years later, I would take that once-baby to her job under that light, and she would drive us back home. Now, with each new season and the gift of another year, I savor the time I get on the other side of that light, floating, diving, reveling in one of the deepest gifts of the glaciers. The healing continues.

With healing has come less concern for the little things, less aversion to risk, more appreciation, more action. Eight years later, here I am, on the other side of the ocean, on his ancestral soil, together here for the first time after we had each been here alone, decades before, now celebrating our twentieth wedding anniversary. In a city where art is everywhere: on the ceilings, on the floors, in the public piazzas, crafted by the greatest of Italian masters, amid a sea of strangers from different lands, I’m drawn in by one, painted by a master from yet another land, the land I flew through and over to arrive here. So many things I thought I knew: Rembrandt was his first name? So many things others thought they knew: it wasn’t a self-portrait after all? It might not have even been finished by him? Oh, the assumptions. Even the title has changed, from Self-Portrait of a Young Man to simply: Portrait of a Young Man. It’s been here in la Galleria degli Uffizi since 1922, when our grandparents were fresh to this planet, when they hadn’t yet found one another, let alone dreamt that their granddaughter and grandson would arrive and survive and thrive and have two children of their own, and be happy. In all the opulence and color of Florence, what draws me in is the mesmerizing light of this small, otherwise dark portrait. I knew it right away to be from the one who has so influenced my own father’s work and inspiration. I look into the eyes of the young man, expecting to see the light there, but it’s not. My eyes are drawn down, down to what I now know as a gorget around his neck, worn by soldiers but captured in this portrait, not on the battlefield, but over the folds of the softest of textures. The floppy black beret on his head absorbs all the light, while the dark metal of the gorget reflects it, above the young man’s heart, reminding those of us on this side of the canvas of the light that still shines outside, transfixing us with the depth of its reflection, yet beckoning us to turn and look toward the outside we cannot see, to the source of the light the artist knew existed beyond the frame. While the light is not coming from within, the young man will forever reflect it, proving the source of the light is out there. An imposter? A traitor? A mirror for ourselves? Maybe he’s a reminder to look toward the source of the light, to pause before assuming, to seek truth beneath the varnish, to preserve and appreciate beauty in simplicity, to give credit where credit is due.

When my eyes and heart and soul have been satiated, I make my way toward the exit, only to find art in the most unexpected place: a wide, unassuming stairwell with a window to the left, the early afternoon’s light filtering through, with a simple, painted replica of that same window, in flat paint, on the opposite wall. Where there isn’t light, we can create it. I continue down the stairs, pass through the light, and find my way through the crowded, winding, cobbled streets, below the red-tile roofs that transfixed me decades before, up the five flights of stairs and back to the one who took action to be here now, to the one who drew me here to join him, to the one whose light continues to shine.

Photo by Shena Driscoll Salvato