Shadows That Give the Light Its Shape

Why the work of remembering is the most important work there is

I saw this painting on X. Something about it spoke to me— the figures leaning into each other, the blue dark pressing close, the way you couldn’t tell who was holding whom, the gold light and the darkness.

I asked Claude to write a prompt to generate a painting inspired by it—

“Abstract oil painting, four or five human figures standing close together in blue and teal darkness, faceless, their bodies merging into and emerging from shadow. Some figures lit from behind with warm amber and copper light, others dissolving into deep indigo and black. The figures lean toward each other as if sharing secrets or holding each other up. No sharp edges anywhere — everything bleeds into everything else. Heavy impasto texture, visible brushstrokes and palette knife work, the paint itself almost sculptural. The mood is tender and haunted simultaneously. The palette moves from warm gold and copper on the left edge through turquoise and teal in the center to deep midnight blue and black on the right. The figures should feel like memories — present but not solid, recognizable as human but impossible to identify. Like looking at your family through water. Like remembering a room full of people you loved who are no longer alive.”

I fed that to DALL-E —

What I got back spoke to me deeply. I played with the file in my iOS app called Darkroom, adjusting every parameter, applying masks to selectively affect different areas.

It felt deeply personal, like it was my family’s portrait.

On the left, bathed in golden light — that’s me. The firstborn. The one who caught the full weight of my father’s expectation before anyone else arrived. There’s a dark shadow across my head and face, and I know exactly what that is. The compound fracture at six that never healed right. The belt at nine. The West Point interview I never wanted. Twenty-one years of being shaped for a future I’d refuse.

Between me and the shadow stands my mother, with her own golden light. Unconditional. Nurturing. The woman who washed my mouth out with Ivory soap for saying fuck when I was five and held me while I threw up when I was sick. Who mailed Toll House cookies to boarding school and drove me to the hospital in the dark when I broke my arm. Her light was warm. But it couldn’t protect me from what was coming.

My father is there too, but he lives in the shadow. The shadow of ambition and control. A man who burned incense while handicapping horses, who told me I could never hit a woman while hitting my mother in the laundry room, who wanted to send me to West Point and refused to pay for film school. Who always carried a roll of hundred dollar bills while my mother hid a few twenties in a tin box.

And then — that chasm of blue.

Luminous, deep, beautiful blue separating me from the figures on the right. My five siblings, and a sixth that died in childbirth. All of them arrived after me into a family that was already cracking. None of them have responded to my book. I haven’t heard from most of them in over a year.

I think my father’s expectations and my fierce rebellion against them — dropping out, getting disinherited at twenty-one, hitchhiking to California with a guitar and eighty “borrowe” dollars from my mother — set something in motion that fifty years couldn’t reverse. I charted my own path, compulsively, obsessively, always leaving, always moving. And then half a century later I opened the suitcase. I laid it all out. I told the truth about what was inside.

It feels like that ‎truth has only deepened the chasm. Or maybe it just made visible the chasm that was always there.

My parents are both gone now. The debris field is dark and divided. I feel regret. I might even feel some guilt — that I let everybody down, that I couldn’t be what anyone needed me to be.

But I also feel clarity. And I feel love for every single person in this painting — the golden ones and the shadowed ones and the ones standing on the other side of the blue. My siblings, whom I miss terribly, and for whom I am still holding space in my heart.

You don’t get to choose which side of the blue you stand on. You don’t get to make the darkness disappear. But you can look at the whole canvas — the warmth and the shadow and the luminous space between — and say: this happened. This is what it looked like. This is what it cost, and this is what it gave me.

The painting hangs in my mind (and soon on a wall in my home) like the truest family portrait we never sat for.

That’s what I mean about shadows and light. The past is not behind you. It’s the thing that gives your present its shape. And if you’ve carried it long enough, and far enough, and you’re ready — open the suitcase. Write it down.

While you still have time.