Some Last Questions, 1993, by Grace Graupe-Pillard. Pastels/cutout canvas, 79″ x 56,” 1993.

A few months before my father died, I completed a painting titled So Hard to Say Goodbye. Twenty-two years later, he still haunts my work. In the last two years of his life, he too had a hard time saying goodbye.

Like a battered boxer knocked down and counted out, he kept holding on. People commented on his “grievous quality of life” after a stroke narrowed his world, depriving him of the ability to speak or to swallow. He could never eat or drink again, and he was left so weakened that he could barely move. Yet I selfishly cherished those last two years.

After he had lost the power to voice his needs and desires, I became fascinated with the words he wrote on a notepad in a spidery, shaky hand, scribbling all over the page as if the ruled lines that he had always lived by were finally flung away, strange characters landing aimlessly on the page.

My father was an intelligent, unassuming, and gentle person who was not effusive with his affection, though he loved his family deeply. In today’s world of shifting alliances his overweening devotion to my mother would be viewed as unusual. Fleeing from Nazi Germany soon after he graduated from Berlin’s Technische Hochschule at a time when other young people were beginning their careers, he escaped to Brazil and from there emigrated to America. He was barely able to save his future wife and her parents, but, tragically, unable to get visas for his own mother and father, who were killed in the concentration camps. He discovered at an early age that the world was chaotic, so he became a careful man supporting his family as a lead architect, designing unglamorous yet much-needed middle-income housing in New York City such as Co-Op City, in the Bronx, Seward Park, on the Lower East Side, and Penn Station South in Chelsea.

Shortly after retiring, my father became ill and needed bypass surgery. During the operation he suffered a small stroke—all visible signs of which disappeared in the subsequent rehabilitation. It took another three years of TIAs (transitory ischemic attacks), during which my father would find himself on the ground wondering how he got there, before he sustained the massive stroke that landed him in the hospital for five months. An effort at rehabilitation proved futile.

During that time he would sit in the wheelchair and painstakingly attempt to communicate. Words were scribbled over sheets of paper, appearing in corners, running down the sides, sometimes repeating over and over the same half-completed thought, expressing the anarchy and jumble of his mind. Yet after deciphering the bizarre script, I realized that the words clearly articulated his tenuous situation in the hospital, where he could not even call out or ring for assistance. He railed against the staff: THEY CHANGED MY POSITION . . .FEEDING NOT CONSTANT . . . WHO WERE THE MURDERERS LAST NIGHT? . . . THE NOSE IS CLOGGED BECAUSE OF THE BARBARIC PUNISHMENT . . . THERE WAS A KNOT IN THE LINE  . . .  WHO MAKES ME SLEEPY ALL DAY?—and the denouement: THE HOSPITAL IS STEALING MY LIFE. Punctuated throughout were cries of HELP! HELP! HELP! My father was also able to convey a profound awareness of his existential crisis, writing: MYSELF, CRY-SELF . . . I CAN’T TALK – I CAN’T SMILE . . . AM I BEING PUNISHED? . . . I’M STUCK . . . TOO DARK . . . DON’T CUT ME OFF . . .