Cryptogram

My three-year-old holds 

her paper to the light. 

“It’s God.”  

Black and blue and red

watercolor rivulets drip to the center 

of a spontaneous symbol.

A mandala, I later realize:

Kubler-Ross stages she cannot grasp, 

yet unconsciously paints in archetypes.

It is the mid-point of mourning 

a Godmother whose brain seized 

before we could say goodbye.

Lately, my daughter cannot sleep—

cries about the shadows

on the walls. Asks me to rock her.

Says, “tell me about the light situation.” 

I tell her the dark lines

above her door are from the kitchen.

“I don’t know if there are snacks 

in heaven.” She sleeps with her

blanket over her eyes. 

At the art table today,

swirling brush in hand, she paints 

a second design: a pastel nautilus, or maze, or—

“labrinyth,” she says. 

The concentric arrangement of self

as irreconcilable lines 

pointing inward, to an empty—

or magic—circular core.

___________________________________________

REFLECTION

Carl Jung believed that the process of creating a mandala – a geometric representation of the self—gestured toward “inner reconciliation and wholeness.” He believed that creating them had a calm, focusing effect on one’s psychological state and that, when made spontaneously, indicated a step toward self-knowledge and reconciling conflicts within us. In short, he believed mandalas depict the sum of who we are.

I had never thought about mandalas until my three-year-old daughter started painting them on her own initiative. She simply woke up from nap eight weeks after her Godmother died and asked to paint with an intensity that felt primal. She walked right to her art table. She got her own water. Put on her own smock. Opened her watercolors. And, without once looking at me or asking for input, painted a series of mandalas.

She is grieving. We are grieving. In the last six months, three important people in our family have died: my beloved aunt-turned-mother, my husband’s namesake uncle, and my daughter’s Godmother. Aunt Kathy died in August. Uncle Jeff in November. Denise in December. 

We prepared my daughter for the first two—explained that Aunt Kathy and Uncle Jeff were sick with cancer. We didn’t use euphemisms; we simply told her that these two people we loved were going to die (but that she was healthy and strong and had her whole life in front of her). Their bodies didn’t work anymore.

Despite knowing that children cannot truly comprehend such permanence until they are school-aged, we explained that once Aunt Kathy and Uncle Jeff died, they were not coming back. Their spirits were going to be with God. In each of their final weeks, we drew them pictures, wrote them letters, even made them posters and a family tree. We said, “we love you.” We said, “goodbye.”

But Denise’s death was sudden and unexpected. Ten minutes after hiking in the woods with us, she had a stroke. Her brain bled through a drain, a shunt, and eventually, seizures. We did not get to say goodbye. It felt more like a ripping away than a death.

The morning we told my daughter that Denise had died, she wiped a tear off my cheek and asked to write her a letter. “It’s a mystery where Denise is,” she said and, without any transitionary cues, went into an ecstatic dance routine. Sweat rolled down her apple cheeks as she leaped and swirled and skipped through midair. She threw the tulle skirt of her skirt upward— toward the ceiling, toward the cosmos, toward the great veil we cannot see—and ran from wall to wall, bouncing inside the container of her unrest.  

The grief poured out of her in somatic release. For thirty minutes, my daughter whirled through dimensions. When she finished dancing, she simply asked to eat lunch.

*

At Denise’s memorial service two weeks later – outdoors because of the pandemic – my daughter sat on the periphery of the eight-person group. She played with her teddy bear in a snowbank, stealing sideways glances at the small campfire. When we told stories of Denise, she pretended to speak as Teddy. 

“We played scaries,” she said in a whisper voice. “Denise and I told those scaries to get away.”

Scaries, she told me the after the memorial service, are monsters. They are black, sometimes black and blue and red and they look like Chewbacca. They are not pretend. They are real. She and Denise fought them off together, in the carpeted closet of our master bedroom. It was the game they played. 

The mandalas she painted six weeks after Denise died were primarily black and blue and red. Intentional, short, deft lines inside a circle. The making of marks. Gestures toward what Jung would call, reconciliation. 

When she finished painting the last of five mandalas, she said, “I am done.” And then, standing back to consider her work, stated: “It is God.” 

She took her apron off. Washed her paintbrushes. Asked to play downstairs. She was ready to move on with her day while I reverberated with the questions,

How do we capture the totality of such loss?

And: 

How does someone Just. Stop. Living?

These are the question I asked myself over and over when my mother died fifteen years ago. I was 22—old enough to understand how she died—in fact, had watched the slow decline of her metastatic organs and labored breathing. But I did not understand how the space she inhabited—the very role she played in my life—could just be … gone. 

And what about the scaries? Who would fight them off now that Denise was gone? Are they just loose? These are the questions I imagine tumbling between my daughter’s temples as the pulls her blankets over her eyes inside her crib and calls me back into her room to ask about the shadows. Are the strips of light on the walls she is so concerned about evidence that scaries still lurk?

How do we heal, make meaning, when form turns to essence?

My daughter of course, does not have these words, or even the cognition to ask these questions, but her body holds the same questions—that out-of-control feeling of, now what? She begs for one more hug now before I leave the room, her separation anxiety back to the level it was when she was a toddler. She is hyper-rigid about her bedtime routine, repeating the same actions and words in obsessive order. She screams when I wear my hair differently. She won’t poop on the toilet. She is grasping for control where she can, and her experience—the overwhelm that drives her behavior into regression— is seeping out of her through art. 

“Out of chaos arises creativity,” Denise—a contemplative and mystic at heart—always used to say. 

* 

In his research, Jung often observed that even patients who had no prior knowledge of mandala making intuitively knew how to express the inner experience through symbols. That they always point toward the center to which everything is related. In his book, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Jung writes, “This is evidently an attempt at self-healing on the part of Nature, which does not spring from conscious reflection but from an instinctive impulse” (p. 388).

It occurs to me that my daughter is transcending the need for words and understanding—simply communing with the divine “center” that resides within her. She is listening when it needs to be expressed through movement and color and modalities infinitely closer to the ephemeral state beyond death than the confines of language allow. As I grope for words, she simply allows her experience to flow out of her. 

According to Jung, she is healing herself.

In her moments of regression, she has just forgotten that she actually knows how to transmute sorrow. As I watch her dance and paint and write letters, I see balance—wholeness—restore through artistic instincts. While she still needs reassurance and love and support, as do I, she is also in touch with the divine alchemy of art. As she whirls and mark-makes, she shows me how, through creative impulse, to trust the curative properties that reside within the watercolored core of a cryptogram.