Barbara Schneider
"The Days of Our Lives are Three Score and Ten… Sometimes"
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| (Photos by Patrick Fraser) |
The Bible says that the days of our lives are three score and ten. Originally this piece was created to acknowledge the incremental nature of seventy years, growing, changing, and surviving through good times and sad times. The spiral shape to suggest how we become ever more concentrated in whom we are. The stitched segments to each represent a year of my life, the punched holes (one for year one, two for year two continuing until I reached year seventy).
I was finished. And then my daughter died at 49 and my vision changed. Not everyone gets three score and ten. That spiral of growth, change, opportunity, and survival stopped for her and left a large black hole in my life. I needed to revise the work to reflect that change, that loss of expectation, that ending of possibility. The piece went from white to black at year forty-nine.
Making this piece took a lot of time - to punch 2485 holes, to stitch and shape, to construct and deconstruct, to change from hopeful to a reflection on grief. While doing so I thought about what I remembered from my seventy years and my daughter’s forty-nine. Mostly it has been good and I can see from the vantage point of having surpassed the three score and ten how even this grief will become part of the whole…someday.