We babysat for her.  By “we”, I mean my wife and I before we had a child.  By “babysat” I mean a valuable service occasionally performed for frazzled, young parent-friends like Beth and T.K..  By “her” I mean their 3 month old daughter Summers. That particular night, “we” were mobilized to replace a babysitter gone MIA. Good friends don’t let friends miss any chance for a well-deserved, romantic evening of dining and adult conversation.

Summers was a beautiful child whose bright blond hair seemed to radiate from some kind of inner blondness.  She loved watching the stuffed animals suspended from the musical carousel above her crib.  Adorable and adored, her parents would break into smile at the mention of her name.  She would grow up in a happy home, which is probably why she and her 2 younger siblings turned out to be such fine people.  During winter break of her senior year at college, a Jeep veered off an embankment and rolled over killing Summers the only passenger without a seat belt.  The funeral was held on Long Island on the coldest, windiest day I can recall.  More than a hundred college friends flew in from across the country to queue up in the bitter cold until everyone cast a ceremonial shovelful of soil.  It took an hour.

Her mother was an artist. In the weeks following the funeral, Beth confided she had an old, unfinished portrait of Summers that she was now dedicating herself to complete.  It was important to her that I see a photo of the work in progress, stored on her computer.  The moment Summers’s portrait came up, an image of a butterfly floated across the screen.  “That’s Summers.”  She smiled.  “Remember, how she always loved butterflies?  I think it started with that cushy, musical toy we used to hang over her crib.  It appeared on the screen the day she died.  It’s always there now.”  Beth eventually completed Summers’s unfinished portrait, which of course, sported a dancing butterfly.  Beth had already survived cancer but almost didn’t survive the loss of her child. She and T.K. established a local support group for families that had lost children.

T.K. had been the only child of prosperous, older parents who grew up to become a good provider, devoted husband and loving father.  I think he pushed himself to prove he was not simply the boss’s son.  Even when his parents died, leaving him a large inheritance, the only change made in T.K.’s life was his address.  He could finally afford to move his growing family out of a 1-bedroom apartment in Bayside and into a cushy home in a wealthy North Shore suburb.  It was a great place to raise kids.  Besides, the house had great light for Beth’s painting.

It came as a quite a shock ten years later, when we learned that T.K. had fallen prey to a long-standing gambling addiction.   He already lost his inheritance.  He was about to lose his business.  Finally, despite taking multiple jobs and working 18 hours a day, he  had to sell their home and move the five of them plus the dog to a more modest community.  Always smart, industrious and savvy… still working three jobs at a time, T.K. built a new career that supported his family and allowed him to eventually repay all his debts.   It also became the most personally rewarding time of his life.  After all, the Boss’s Son proved he could succeed on his own.  Beth and T.K. were happy, content and relieved that they would be able to afford a good college for their older daughter Summers.

In the year after the funeral, Beth tried to exorcize her grief through painting.  Perhaps unfairly blaming himself, T.K. turned his grief inward.  While he still greeted us with a warm smile it would only be minutes before he would retreat behind some invisible, protective wall.  For that year, visiting them remained a draining experience.  One snowy evening, I caught local television news reporting on a Long Island man who had suffered a heart attack and died from shoveling.  The next day, we learned it had had been T.K..  He was buried next to his daughter on a cold, windy day exactly one year later, to the day.

It was touch and go for the next three years but Beth finally chose survival by immersing herself in the parent’s support group she and T.K. had founded.  In a sense, the work she had started to help other families cope with the loss of a child now became her raison d'etre.  One day she declared her daughter's portrait finished and hung it up for visitors to see. That's the day she started building the group into a foundation capable of providing greater support for more people. 

That's also when she began receiving requests from other grieving parents to paint similar portraits for them from photographs.  Beth's art has touched scores of families across the US.  Although I have used fictitious names for this post, the people are very real.  It is very easy to spot one of Beth’s paintings.  Each incorporates a child’s portrait capturing a unique beauty seeming to radiate from some kind of inner blondness.  And each contains a dancing butterfly.

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