What can one ever say about the unexpected loss of a loved one? That it feels absurd and utterly unbelievable\u2014and continues to be exactly that as time moves on? Yes, the finality of an unanticipated death feels so much more impossible to accept. And there is a stubborn contradiction to this permanence\u2014the loss continues to live on in the present even as one remains incredulous of its presence. Surprisingly, it is the imagination that proves the most resistant to such a finality because it is so easy to imagine him still here with us. So easy to expect him at any moment. So easy to wait for (and then look at) his next painting. So easy to meet up with him in our dreams.<\/p>\n
But the unexpected has no rules; or rather, it breaks any of the rules you had before. The first rule, for us, I suppose, was that of being twins. And what a bizarre little game that is. And how can a twin ever stop being anything but that\u2014even in death?<\/p>\n
Keith seems very much still here. I mean, literally here in this world. For example, some months ago (it was one of those wonderfully unexpected warm winter nights we sometimes get around here), I was leaving my apartment building when, suddenly, it felt as if I were Keith. I can\u2019t explain it, and I can\u2019t even say I know why or where such a moment came from. Often, I say something in a particular way, or I laugh in a manner\u2014even I recognize\u2014seems more like Keith\u2019s laugh or his way of phrasing something than mine. It\u2019s as if I am saying to myself, hey, you\u2019re sounding just like him. But it wasn\u2019t like that that night. It was something more than a momentary resemblance. That night, perhaps it was the look of the sky or the sound of the trees, but suddenly I seemed to be him rather than me. It\u2019s as if I had suddenly stepped out of my body, all the while remaining in it. Perhaps it was just one of those imaginative quirks humans are plagued with, but if so, it was the first such quirk of that kind I have ever experienced.<\/p>\n
Such moments should not be confused with those times when I consciously imagine myself in a moment\u2014such as standing in front of Picasso\u2019s Guernica in Madrid\u2014in the way I imagine he would have been in that moment. I do this often, consciously, when looking at art, which I do a lot, whereas the incident I describe above seemed to originate from outside me, from outside my conscious imagination. Perhaps with twins there\u2019s an additional connection to this world that isn\u2019t there for non-twins. Obviously, I\u2019m romanticizing here, but it did feel oddly as if I were, for a moment, somebody else entirely, yet a somebody else entirely familiar to me\u2014my brother.<\/p>\n
If ghosts do exist, perhaps this is one form of their manifestation? Since my brother\u2019s death, he hasn\u2019t returned in such a dramatic manner again\u2014at least not yet. But he was never dramatic\u2014or rather, melodramatic\u2014in life. Certainly, the drama was there, and at times it felt Shakespearean, both in its intensity and its comedy. Keith\u2019s way through life was sometimes awkward, but it was also defiantly spirited, if not always charmingly understated, and always rich in quietly startling ways. The richness lies in the exact details of his life\u2014as it does in his paintings\u2014rather than in the trajectory (i.e., the big story) of his life. His story is perhaps familiar enough. A person tries to paint in a world that doesn\u2019t treat its painters particularly well. But let\u2019s not romanticize this beyond what it really was, simply a deep commitment to painting.<\/p>\n
No, Keith didn\u2019t make it BIG, though I think he should have. And I think he will\u2014eventually. But that\u2019s a different story, one that is far from over just yet. You hear a lot about painters and lucky breaks, and for a long while it seemed his would never come. What he accomplished (and eventually learned) as a painter and a person came at a cost. Hard lessons seemed the rule for both of us, and sometimes they took longer than either of us would have liked. I suspect I\u2019ve still got a few difficult ones to learn. But Keith finally seemed to have moved past the hard lessons. And his final paintings began to take on a new quality, a new seriousness and determination that held a heartbreaking promise, heartbreaking because he died too soon to benefit from his hard-earned new sense of what he could (and wanted to) do with his painting.<\/p>\n
We lived separate lives, to be sure. I was the first to move to Colorado. He followed later. Although we lived in the same town, off and on for some twenty-five years, we had our own circles of friends, though several overlapped. After he graduated with his MFA, he lived in Reno, Nevada, from the summer of 1989 to the early winter of 1993. He returned to Nevada a second time for a year, this time in Incline Village, Lake Tahoe, in 1997-98, where he managed\u2014and kept afloat\u2014a restaurant and bar. In the years since his return in 1998, he worked as a web designer (i.e., his day job). He looked elsewhere for teaching jobs, but somehow he remained here, and in this last decade (1998-2008), it seems now, in retrospect, that it all quietly fell into place for him.<\/p>\n
It would be too easy to reduce all of this to a familiar narrative about the eternal bonds of our twinship. And such narratives always seem too Wagnerian to me. Besides, my brother preferred Puccini, especially La Boh\u00e8me, that marvelous reworking of a collection of vignettes that championed the young bohemians living in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the 1840s. Bohemians were always Keith\u2019s crowd, so to speak.<\/p>\n
The fact\u2014or rather, the accident\u2014that for most of our adult lives we lived in the same town and worked in the same university department for almost a decade seemed to us anything but a deliberate\u2014or conscious\u2014plan. If it wasn\u2019t exactly an accident, it was most certainly an ongoing mystery. It\u2019s not the sort of mystery that great lives are made of, but it is the sort of mystery that now seems sacred to me. And when I think of the motif of \u2018the lucky break,\u2019 I\u2019ve only now come to realize that it was always already there for us, right from the beginning! And Keith was the one who sensed it first\u2014he was always the one returning, whereas I always longed to go elsewhere. I was the one who needed something as stupid as his death to finally see \u2018the lucky break\u2019 for what it was.<\/p>\n
When I look at one of his paintings now (or remember those times when he showed me a new one), I am both proud and amazed. I think his work is exceptional, and I will always take great comfort in the fact that I have been a steadfast advocate for it. I will certainly continue to be so. But it seems his work is even more to me now. It\u2019s as if it has become, on one level, the surety of my life.<\/p>\n
Keith often said of himself, \u201cIt\u2019s not important to be the painter\u2014anyone can be that. What\u2019s important is to remain a painter!\u201d Despite everything, he remained a painter until the day he died. I am reminded of something the Chilean author Roberto Bola\u00f1o once said about poets. He wrote:<\/p>\n
If I had to hold up the most heavily guarded bank in Europe and could choose my partners in crime, I\u2019d take a gang of five poets, no question about it. Five real poets, Apollonian or Dionysian, but always real, ready to live and die as poets. No one in the world is as brave as a poet. No one in the world faces disaster with more dignity and understanding.<\/p>\n
I agree; however, I would choose painters.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Kevin Foskin, September 2011<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What can one ever say about the unexpected loss of a loved one? That it feels absurd and utterly unbelievable\u2014and continues to be exactly that as time moves on? Yes, the finality of an unanticipated death feels so much more … Continue reading