The Kinkade

“Truth is too much to bear without goodness and beauty.” – Tresta Payne

Hello, Poetry Friend

One of the things I love about Substack is getting ideas from other writers — often of things that have been sitting right there, waiting to be written, that I never thought had any value until someone else wrote about them.

Like my family’s painting by Thomas Kinkade. Thank you, Tresta Payne, for pointing to the beauty hanging above my piano, which, to our family, is much more than a piece of art.

In 1981, my mother developed breast cancer. A metastasis was discovered on October 29, 1984, in her third cervical vertebrae, resulting in a prognosis of 18 months to two years to live — max. Before beginning radiation she and my dad took a trip to Northern California, where her father was from. While in Carmel, they happened into the Cottage Gallery, intrigued by a painting titled “Morning Mist.” The artist was some local guy named Thomas Kinkade. Who finished the painting on October 29, 1984.

During her weeks of radiation, Mom pictured that painting. She lived another 26 years.

Here’s what she later wrote to Kinkade’s people:

Mentally putting myself in that painting took me away from the sights and sounds of the radiation. I would imagine myself walking down that winding road toward the bend, fullying expecting Jesus Christ to be walking toward me,s tepping out form around the unseen part of the road where the light and the mist and a bird converged. His face would be smiling, radiant, reassuring, and his arms would be open to me.

–Merry Nell Drummond

That Christmas, Dad surprised Mom with the painting.

There are no prints. No one seems to know that it exists. At one point I admit I was tempted to ditch it. Thanks be to God, my husband talked me out of that stupidity.

There is a movie about Kinkade, documenting his demons and how everything came crashing down in the end. He died from an overdose. After his death his family found a vault with 6,000 of his paintings, never before seen.

I wonder how Mom would have handled the news. Somehow the revelation about Kinkade doesn’t affect my love of the painting. Maybe it’s because I know there are probably others like it — gracing some home somewhere, valuable to the owners because of its place in their story.

~

Every day I write, I write a poem. Most of them aren’t very good, but I don’t mind because I love to create. Someday my family will find hundreds of poems on my computer, which I am trying to organize and label better. There will be poem-notes on index cards that I intended to play with, poem-scribbles in my calendar and in old notebooks that should have been thrown away or — dare I say it — should have been shared.

During my mom’s last three years, I wrote 72 poems. The best ones are in The Joy of Poetry, but I treasure the others too. Not because they’re good (most of them aren’t), but because they place me with her.

Here’s the one I wrote for the Kinkade. Now that I have my mom’s letter to his people, I know some of my details are incorrect. But that’s okay. Because, as Tresta reminded me, “Truth is too much to bear without goodness and beauty.”

Kinkade

When my parents came home from their big trip 
to California with a giant painting,
I knew something was up. 

Turns out it was her tumor markers. Cancer 
in her bones, in her neck. She had 6 months. 
Maybe a year or two. Maybe 18 months. 
I was thirteen. They did not elaborate. 

They did hang the painting with all that light
shining across a garden path, in morning's mist,
with a gate opening into what looked like spring, 
a gate she was determined not to pass through.

Happy poeming!

Megan