At seventy-six years of age, it took Rosetta a while to glue each tiny plastic pearl in its place on her sturdy shoe-sized cardboard box. For weeks, Rosetta had been gluing small pearls and painting the tiniest of cornflower blue flowers, so many, in fact, that she dreamt of fields of blue flowers at night. Dreaming of flowers was better than the nightmares she usually had. Nightmares about the restraints from the hospital stay long ago, or what her brother had done to her when she was just a young teen, when her eyes were clear and brighter blue.
If this was therapy, this was great. Rosetta loved her Carson Center’s Art Therapist. They didn’t sit awkwardly in chairs, looking at each other, waiting for words to untangle something that wanted to stay tangled. They talked about the feel of these sturdy materials, about mixing color, and about making a Comfort Box. What would a Comfort Box for Rosetta look like? What would it hold?
Rosetta found beautiful pictures and soft materials—a kind of white fur and even satin–to grace her box. Inside it were things that said everything, without demanding words. There were the pine needles that reminded her of the soft and forgiving bed under her feet that awaited her in the woods, even if she couldn’t get there much now. There was birch bark, a love letter from her favorite tree, which reminded her of her mother’s white skin, their shared love of the water and how it is that this tree, and her mother, would weaken and die under too much battering stress. There was water in a jar, with seaweed. Sure, that would have to be changed often, but so too do we have to often freshen and change the way we care for our always changing self. There were seventy-six years of reflections in this box. Every time Rosetta opened it, there was something new to discover.
Like the young woman on the cover. Her Carson Art Therapist had shown her how to use the materials that made the picture shiny and stick permanently among the flowers and the pearls. Rosetta had labored especially over this picture she’d cut out of a young woman. She added tint, found the right brightness to surround her with, making sure she was ensconced in beauty. For many weeks she had labored over her art and, once complete, for many weeks more she sat at home with this breathtaking box.
“I know who she is,” Rosetta said with surprise and some finality in her voice. “She is my daughter.”
And so Rosetta told what she had not told to her many helpers over the decades and what she could tell with the grace of that box and all its months of comforts filling the place that opened in the telling. “When my brother forced me, I went to that hospital where the attendant forced me, too.. I became pregnant and they made me have that operation…I think this is what she would have looked like.” Rosetta sat with her Art Therapist.
Together, they mourned. Together, they found more ways to paint and cut and color and move and hold the many things this shining face had to tell them.
By JAC Patrissi
