Santa Margarita is one of the many pieces I worked on in an effort to understand and bear the loss of my family, particularly as my mother was dying. The grief seemed lessened as I picked through old family photos seeing for myself that once I was part of a teeming family.
This collage is the story of a family meeting for picnics and dancing in the grass of the cemetery with both the live and the dead. At its base is a particular configuration of trees I passed by and noticed just about every day over the course of sixteen years, as I drove or cycled to and from my work in Santa Rosa or business in Sebastopol from Bodega. The arching tree, bending away from the stand seemed poetic enough to mark a place for my dad and it grew in the Pleasant Hill cemetery.
My dad, Donald Clyde Parson, died unexpectedly from a heart malfunction in nineteen-seventy-eight, when he was forty-nine years old. His watch stopped at 5:20 in the morning, I believe this is when he died in his bed, next to my mother. She never talked about how horrible that must have been. She was furious with him at the time. I came to build a story that it was the horrible anger she confronted and overwhelmed him with, an anger they both agreed he deserved for transgressions he could not deny or repair, that caused his heart to stop him from ever hurting anyone again. Or so they thought.
I lost him with no ceremony. Mom refused him a place to rest in peace, where I could visit, speak with his ghost, finish up the business we had together or just to sit by quietly. So I created this place. I put us, three sisters, there when we were young, innocently happy. Dad is standing, second from the right, in the family photo line, back on the family ranch in Santa Margarita. I don't know that life was ever kindly for him, but certainly more in that photo than on most days. The playing spirits in the air are divers from the Leni Riefenstahl film of the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany, dancing in their own netherworld. The ground and air all around the festivities is gold, the ceremonial color for death in my world. The orange and pink soft formed stones are for the newly departed, the grey for the long ago dead. Uncle Manuel's finely suited friend is just stepping in, or out of his stone for the festivities. It's a dreamy place that gives me breath when I look at it, quiets me.
