yesterday we were out walking around the inman park neighborhood looking at house paint for a house i barely know, the taylor house in winston-salem, a house i’ve driven past once, yet have never entered, and i was thinking about life and living in the face of death and dying.

what’s say we circle back, once or twice more around the block.

first though, a tiny bit of background:

in the way that other parents have some cars, or some dogs, or some firearms, my folks have some houses. mom’s passion for historic homes and dad’s belief in investments-you-can-actually-see thus find middle ground (this, young people, is how 60-year marriages work). we’ll meet some of these houses along the way, but this one paragraph is the only explaining i’ll ever do; hereafter i’ll just say ‘one of mom’s houses’ and we’ll act like that’s normal.  they enjoy fixing up old houses, and are gracious enough to seek my opinion and my brothers’ opinion. when it comes to crucial things like paint colors and table settings, we are an opinionated family (this may already be clear).

the taylor house, in winston-salem (where i was born), is the house currently benefiting from our collective opinions. so i find myself, 340 miles away from it, going up to strangers, asking if i can photograph their house paint.

so it is (because it’s fall, and the leaves are scuttling along, and the houses are old, and so are many of the people who live in them, and because of the call from my eulogy client, and also just because i’m me), that i find myself thinking about death and dying and how it is that we stave off despair in the face of the void.

it turns out that people have really strong responses when you ask them about house paint. who knew? cursing painters who are now fifteen years gone; rushing inside to get crumpled sheaves of paint chips; searching dim memory for names of paint colors, which sound like fragments of poems or recipes, or for names of paint makers, which sound like law firms or spaceships.

then this one woman came out onto her porch and stepped into a bleakness, the question of house paint opening up some deep pain. ‘we just painted it six years ago,’ she says, ‘and look at it. we’ll have to have it redone next year.’ the look in her eyes as she contemplated the expense and disappointment and failed promise of it. that she did not weep,  that i did not need to hug her neck and murmur ‘there, there’– it now seems a near miss. but miss we did. perhaps due to the sunlit fall splendor of the day, she pulled it together, i snapped a few pictures, we waved and parted, as if the angel of existential despair had not, one scant minute earlier, hovered there over her porch swing.

it was then, as i walked back into the slantwise sunlight, that i wondered if painting your house isn’t the same as living, in the face of death. you know you’ll have to do it again, but you pretend this coat will be the last one it ever needs. you try to wrap your head around it, but a house is too big, and color too ephemeral to ever truly, concretely imagine.  so you take a chance, and do the work. you scrape at it, and curse it, and damn the ones who labor on your behalf, or maybe, instead, you bring them a glass of lemonade. you watch through the years as a thin veneer either holds off the rot and decline, the rain and the sun, or else fails to.

but as i walked, and the leaves blew past, all that seemed too absolute, too clear. a house is real in ways that death can never be. a house is a presence, and death is an absence. then it came to me: the best metaphor (which is always the freshest one, the one not yet through the wringer): living while dying is like painting a house you’ve only driven past once. not your house, but a house barely glimpsed, simultaneously real and abstract. maybe you remember it, maybe you think of how your mother or brother has described, maybe you even look for it on the internet. there it is:

virtual, actual, imagined, remembered, described, miles and hours and days and years away.

still in need of paint.

and that’s what we do. we paint the imaginary house. for it’s otherwise too awful, and doing the work is hopeful, and is all we have. that nice japanese woman has made fortune with ‘the life-changing magic of tidying up’;  the best i have today is ‘the life-changing magic of facing death by painting the imaginary house’. i think both of us are saying the same things: find joy. do small things well. hold back the void by tackling what you can. glory in this moment and this space and this day.

tidy up. paint the house. enjoy the sunlit afternoon.

till soon.