A classmate died recently. I hadn’t known her well, and we hadn’t stayed in touch.
I didn’t like her, but the reason for my enmity had everything to do with me and nothing to do with her. I was tight, judgmental and mean back then, constricted by ambition, a binding garment that made me unhappy.
Her name was Orleigh Epp, and she resembled the actress Ellen Barkin, with an asymmetrical, rough face, that was both beautiful and ugly, sexy, raw and expressive. I watched her closely and came to conclusions about her in my imagination. She was everything that I was not—at ease in her body, her slightly bovine hipbones lifting her frayed jean skirt in alluring undulations, her matted hair proof of long, voluptuous nights, her drooping eyelids further evidence of an abandon and comradery from which I exiled myself. She often went barefoot, and her narrow feet and arched toes annoyed me because they were so dirty. I found her unclad feet an affectation. Most of her was an affront to me, because I went to bed early and alone, a novel on the bedside table. I called my parents every day. I wore unsexy shoes, showered regularly and was shy, and yet none of this made me a better painter than she was. In fact, quite the opposite. She dashed and dabbed paint in an easy and messy manner that added up to splendor, whereas I was tight and vaguely panicked, afraid that each assignment I completed would reveal that I wasn’t actually an artist at all.
Our teacher that year was a tall man with a thick mane of white hair and a patrician manner. I remember Orleigh arriving a bit late to class, a self-portrait on a haphazardly stretched canvas dangling loosely from two fingers, which were bedecked with heavy, ornamental rings and dusted with black charcoal residue. I had been waiting for his attention, was proud of my work that week, but he rushed over to Orleigh and exclaimed over her thick, wet image, holding it up for the class to see while she folded herself onto the floor and assumed the lotus position, not even smiling, just listening and nodding intently, eyes at half-mast.
And so, I villainized her silently, making fun of her in my imagination, naming her clothing “pelts,” because they seemed so skin-like, loathing her tinkling ankle bracelets, hoping that she would lack the driven tenacity to keep painting, launch a career, succeed. Which is what I tried to do, pushing myself to work ever longer hours, getting accepted into a prestigious painting program, silencing my desires to leave it, become a minister or a social worker or a therapist, dismissing those thoughts as false, when they did in fact represent very real components of my temperament.
At times, I tried to find Orleigh online, but never succeeded. She had made a lasting impression on me, but I attributed my desire to learn what had happened to her to have origins in jealousy and malice.
And then she appeared on my college’s Facebook page, her face in close-up, tanned and creased, but familiar, text beneath the photograph asking to please help Orleigh Epp to raise money for her son Roo, who was just sixteen, and had lost his father to illness three years previously. Now, Orleigh was fighting cancer. The story unfurled. She had been diagnosed the year before with an unspecified cancer. There were photos of her and Roo on the beach, arms entwined, his head unselfconsciously leaning on her shoulder. A year after remission, an Emergency Room visit revealed that her cancer had surged back. She was in hospice now, waiting to die. There was a photo of her in a beanie, her baldness covered, her expression frank and accepting, staring directly into the camera.
She lived in Albuquerque and was active in the art scene there, attending openings, hosting happenings, making work constantly, that ranged from figurative murals to huge, fire-belching sculptures. She had loved her husband fiercely, and was a devoted mother to Roo. Art, community and family were important to her, and she contributed generously.
Two days later, it was reported that Orleigh had died. One comment said, “Orleigh is gone now. Flying free.”
“Or just profoundly in non-being,” I thought, uncharitably, “which may or may not be free. None of us knows.”
Nobody’s life is uncomplicated, and the Orleigh that I describe is not the real Orleigh at all (and I have changed her name and some details to protect her identity). I did not know her, never actually spoke to her, and so she is just a figment of my own psyche, no different than a character in a memorable dream. But what I do know, is that I overlooked something essential that I attributed to her, and impugned it, when it fact it held value and could have taught me lessons that balanced my own emotional rigidity.
I judged Orleigh for an unmitigated response to being alive. She walked barefoot on concrete in late fall in New England, and moved to New Mexico, where videos exist of her laying on an enormous canvas and moving her arms and legs like a snow angel. She made art her whole life, but also raised a child and lost a husband and knit herself into a community. Her various bodies of work do not match cohesively but instead flowed out of her and were expressions of what she felt at the moment.
One of the last communal interactions that she participated in was held at the hospice. Orleigh is in a wheelchair, a thin smattering of bright white hair covering her fragile skull. Roo is by her side. Many of her works of art hang on the hospice walls and some are presented to her. Her thin face creases into a bright grin and she waves to the camera and then claps.
Seeing my own work presented to me in a manner that speaks of finality would not make me smile, but weep, for my smallness and for my finitude. Orleigh’s gaiety, whether feigned for Roo, or genuine, is courageous, as is the fact that she made art all her life, and appeared to love people deeply. It seems like she made her contribution, and accepted its parameters. She said that she didn’t want to die, but confronted with death’s inevitability, she was present for it, and, it appears, serene.