Background
Julia Westerbeke and Claire Kessler-Bradner
The Interview
Pencil on cut paper
10 x 10 inch frames
2021
Interview, 2021
You ask:
What has it felt like?
To be a teacher during the pandemic?
A parent?
An artist?
The wife of a hospital doctor?
How has it felt?
I answer:
I will try again to say it, for you.
My job is this:
To take it all in
The horrors of the world
The relentless fears
The illness that could kill
The stifling limits, immobility
The vast absence of our loved ones
The overwhelming truth of injustice, and the roiling, righteous anger
The helicopters overhead and the windows boarded up
The air, unbreathable with smoke
The apocalyptic skies on that dark orange day
And its terrifying implications for our collective future
The unhinged humans, ranting through their noisy sorrow
Just outside our door
The election and the insurrection and the
Avalanche of lies
The New Rules and the New Rules and the New Rules again
The disappointment of the
Pendulum swing, renewing our fears and our vigilance
Each and every time we begin to relax
And yes, the Death.
And my job is this:
To absorb it all
To hold the hard truths
To filter them through the sieve of myself so that they
Come out the other side, digestible
Manageable
Reframed through the distortion of my lens
So that they,
The small people in my care,
Feel improbably, impossibly
Safe, seen, steady,
To explain it all in the most careful words
So that they understand just enough to be
Cautious, conscientious, empathetic and brave
But not enough to despair.
And left behind, in the sieve of myself, is this:
Everything I refuse to burden them with.
The thick, sticky residue of
Cruelty, disaster, hopelessness
Coating my ribs
Kept where they can’t see it
Behind my masked smile, my practiced optimism,
My insides turning with trash.
Because above all else, my job is this:
The survival of their Hope.
Even if it means I am left stewing
In the ugly detritus
Of it all.
