My Kid Could Paint That

The Color Yellow

Okay. We made it but before I talk about the River Scheldt, I’d like to take a moment to say thank you to a few people. First, my parents for being the bravest people I know. You two are incredible. To my brothers, Matt and Tommy I wouldn’t trade our late nights talks for anything in the world. To all the people that stayed after Trevor died, you could of left but instead you stood by my family, and I don’t know how I ever will repay you. And to those who entered my life after Trevor I want so desperately to share him with you because in knowing him, you will understand me. 

As I stare out at the Sailboats of the River Scheldt I marvel at how beautifully Rysselberghe captures the reflection of the water with his neo-impressionism brushstrokes. I chose to end with Rysselberghe because I feel rooted when I look at this painting. I see four shadows dancing across the water with the setting sun. Matt, Trevor, Megan, Tommy. Forever bonded together in Kirsten and Rick, the house on Wenonga Lane and swimming pool games. 

Rysselberghe smothers his painting in yellow, which is sometimes how I live my life. I see Trevor in the specs of things, a sunflower, a dolphin, myself. I am no longer solely the girl with the dead brother or PTSD. I am Megan. I get up and live my life the best I can, some days hurt a little more than others and on those days I find myself in yellow. I embrace the joy Trevor brought into my life, attempting to forget all the pain and feel okay. I’m seventeen, and I’m watched the world repeatedly take those I love and managed still have hope. 

Studying art history this year has renewed that hope, for a while I thought Trevor was slipping away but then I found him in Rothko, Turner, Malevich and many more. He was reassuring me he had never left. 

Today as the sun sets on Rysselberghe’s dock our journey also comes to an end. I leave you with something I’ve learned. Grief ripples through your life, knocking you off your feet sometimes, but the person you lost, they will never leave you. They turn up in other things, so keep your eyes open. Now go find yourself in your own yellow, and I promise you’ll be okay. 

The Color Yellow

Throughout elementary school I grew accustomed to being the girl with the dead brother and as I entered Barstow I saw an opportunity to leave that identity behind. All my attempts to suppress him surfaced on that day freshmen year. 

I felt the weight of Trevor’s death at 16, sitting in my Algebra II class grief engulfed me. PTSD they told me. I laughed. I had not been to war. I didn’t know true trauma...people dying was normal for me...expected from me. 

Rothko’s Yellow No. 6 captures the standstill I felt. The anxiety controlled me as I pulsed against the white and blue. I struggled to find where I belong and felt immense pressure to be that happy, carefree, teenager I thought I was supposed to be. I wished desperately for simplicity, to feel nothing instead of too much. 

Rothko feared being engulfed by the black, and I feared destroying the yellow. In high school you can’t intermingle dead brothers within conversations about so and so’s new hairstyle. You run the risk of being labeled the depressed girl, the over-emotional girl, the cold girl and whatever else people come up with. You can never win, someone will always have an impression of you that you do not see in yourself. Rothko built walls between his blues and yellows and I have done the same. 

He separates his colors to remind us to stay impersonal at times, to distance ourselves from our past and our future and simply exist. I carry Trevor with my everyday, but I refrain from feeling him, because in the mixing of colors comes couscous. An uncontrollable spiral that can surface at any moment. Rothko recognizes that compartmentalizing is the key to sanity. I keep Trevor alive by keeping him between the yellow hues, he’s safe there. I’m safe there. 

With the yellow engulfing me as I close my eyes, we are back on the carpet, watching Tarzan, just me and him. Young and blissfully unaware of our future.

The Color Yellow

The Color Yellow

He died. On July 2nd, 2005 in a hotel room in Omaha he died. I slept only a room away from him. To be awoken by the screams of my mother, “He’s not breathing. He’s not breathing” as she dialed 911. Almost eleven years later I can still picture the pain on her face. I’ve tried my best to forget that day. Forget how my little brother and I were ushered to a Burger King by my step-grandmother as if a cherry slushie could fix everything. 

A week later, I saw my brother for the last time.There’s something about a corpse, maybe it’s the stillness that you can’t quite explain. The feeling of watching their torso, thinking that you if you look hard enough you will see the rise and fall of their chest once more. I remember looking into his casket, seeing his hands placed artificially at his torso. I don’t remember his face, only his hands and my mom and my brothers and some man I still don’t recognize today. I get that same feeling of the mediocrity of death when I look at Gauguin’s Yellow Christ. 

In Yellow Christ, Gauguin captures the movement of a corpse. He focuses on the peacefulness of death. He juxtaposes that peace with business of the people around Christ, their inability to stand still. The stillness of death causes people to move in a hyperactive state out of the fear of slowing down. By placing Christ up against the countryside, Gauguin not only creates depth but alsodemonstrates death as fact of life, something that exists between the hills, hovering above the women as an afterthought - something so blatantly obvious that it drifts out of focus. 

Gauguin’s Christ, in its sickly yellow color, represents the gross decay of a body as it returns to the Earth. The body knows how to die, the mind on the other hand finds it incomprehensible. I was six almost seven still trying to figure how to tie my shoes when all of sudden I learned sometimes you wake up and someone you love is gone.

I don’t like to go to sleep.