I am not sure what blinding light my mother saw as a small child, but her future was much darker than whatever caused her to squint up at the sky as she stumbled across a barren farm field. The photograph in which my mother finds the light so unbearable must have been taken at the end of World War II. She would have been three or four years old when the last low-flying German Junkers dropped their bombs on innocent civilians. In the black-and-white photo, her feet are protected in sturdy leather shoes that turn inward from the world, but her body, clothed in nothing more than a thin cotton dress, casts a long shadow on the ground; it is likely late afternoon. I wonder if she saw a dark spot hurling across her retinas before it trailed out of sight—or was it merely the sun? My mother cocks her head to the side, uncertain. Her wispy white hair is parted at a sharp angle, and thin curls brush against the base of her neck. Even that empty field seems to fill her with anxiety; she leans into the light, holding one hand behind her back as if hiding something that she knows will be taken from her in time.
I know better than to stare for more than a few seconds at the sun. The few times that I have stared at it in defiance, I have had to blink and turn away because it is too painful. I keep my eyes closed for a moment, but black spots still span the darkness—my retinas are overwhelmed, and a headache or blurry vision will likely follow. Even though I know to avert my gaze on days that should be bright and beautiful, sometimes it is hard not to be angry at God; in the dark depths of despair, my mother’s sister removed her clothing on the edge of a desolate road, folded it in a neat little pile, and drowned herself in a nearby river when she was thirty-two-years old.
Even as a young child, I knew that something was not quite right with my mother; our curtains were always closed and she rarely left the house. She was ashamed of mental illness, and even death itself as if it were a character flaw that could be mastered with determination and self-discipline. My mother assumed that suicide was something that God would not forgive; and so the bright light in the photograph that once caused my mother to squint in that desolate field, has never been—at least in my mind—a warm and life-giving sun during a carefree summer afternoon in the 1940s. Rather, it is a light similar to the one that stares down from the heavens in Pablo Picasso’s war-torn Guernica; a terrifying manifestation of a remote God who created the cold universe, set its screeching mechanical cogs in motion and then refused to interact on behalf of his suffering creation.
Ten years before my mother squinted at a sun that was too bright for her to endure, Pablo Picasso also gazed up at the same indifferent light, infuriated that bombs were falling on his beloved Spain. In protest of Francisco Franco’s brutal uprising during the Spanish Civil War, when the small town of Gernika was razed to the ground on April 26, 1937, the artist furiously painted Guernica with what appears to be a sun that gazes down on a chaotic battlefield. This ambiguous object was one of the last things that he added to the painting, a work of art that I often turned to as a teenager when I was struggling to understand the world. In later versions, Picasso surrounded the incomplete white area at the top of the canvas with jagged brushstrokes in a pitch-black sky as if not even the artist could identify what he would eventually create. Would it be the sun or a light bulb? I see the eye of God, but sometimes it is—an exploding bomb.
My mother left her small Wisconsin farming community once she graduated high school, so she never really developed a close relationship with Betty, her only sister who was much younger; there was an eleven year difference in age. When Betty married Vernon, a Marine staff sergeant with thick, black-framed eyeglasses who was on his third marriage, they lived on military bases in Hawaii and California before returning to Wisconsin to be closer to family. Vernon had developed lesions on his brain from multiple sclerosis that forced his early discharge, as well as reliance on both sturdy walking shoes and a dark wooden cane. As Vernon slowly lost control of his muscles, he pounded his cane on the ground with each one of his slow steps, diverting attention from the darkness in his eyes. My mother rarely spent time with her sister; occasionally they talked on the phone or gathered at a holiday celebration that was notably never at Betty’s house. When I was a teenager, though, I often overheard my mother behind closed doors, sobbing on the telephone. According to my grandmother, Betty was not well—she had started seeing things that were not there.
While I have always had my own suspicions about what the things were that Betty experienced, the small-town community in which she lived seemed content to diagnose her with schizophrenia. I knew very little about this mental disorder, except that those who have it experience paranoid delusions and hallucinations, such as hearing voices. They may also exhibit abnormal motor behavior—child-like silliness, twitching, or jerky movements—and even undergo a decline in personal hygiene; sometimes they stop washing their hair and changing their clothes.
Betty had none of these symptoms of schizophrenia, though. I remember her demurely placing her hands in her lap when she sat on my grandmother’s davenport, engaging in casual small talk, and meeting my eyes. Her sincere face, wide smile, and high forehead reminded me of my own. She wore denim miniskirts and short-sleeve collared shirts on the same warm summer days that my mother covered herself with white turtlenecks and polyester checkered pantsuits. Betty was neither agitated nor withdrawn from the world. She did not hear voices in the walls that told her someone was trying to kill her or cause her harm; and so, despite what I know about the delusional effects of schizophrenia, I have always believed what Betty told my grandmother behind closed doors: Her husband beat her until she could not see straight.
The Eye of God—this is what I call that ambiguous sun in Picasso’s Guernica—emits an aura of sharp flames. The flaming aura is the only thing that casts a shadow in the painting, not the panting bull, the decapitated soldier, or the writhing horse. The inner core of the Eye of God is illuminated by the scribbled filament of an incandescent light bulb. It glares down from the ceiling of a dark room turned battlefield. Ghostly humans and animals wander the charred remains of this underworld. A pale woman reaches out from the window of a burning building, her arm stretched beyond recognition. She clutches a lamp. Beside the building, another ghostly figure tries to run from the aerial attack, but she can barely limp across the street. Then there is the weeping woman in Guernica whose clothes have been ripped from her body during a bomb blast. Unaware of her own nakedness, she clutches a limp child with the light gone out in his eyes. The mother raises her head to God and screams.
If my mother were to now look up at the bright light in Picasso’s Guernica—nearly forty years since my sister killed herself—she would likely see nothing more than a dim light bulb hanging down from the ceiling of a dark room, not a remote God who created the universe and set its mechanical cogs in motion. My mother would see what she needs to see: a predictable circle of human-made illumination in a world of unspeakable violence. Because my mother was unable to live with uncertainty, she limited her existence to what she could control with the flick of an electrical switch at the entrance to every dark room in her home. These delicate boundaries of 60-watt light cast by table lamps, allowed no room for friends, and very little for family. It was hard not to be angry and frustrated with her when she sank into soft sofas for days at a time, confining herself to smaller and smaller circles, the way Anaïs Nin once said, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” Within these circles of diminishing light, my mother’s bouts of white-hot anger left her little energy, and certainly no compassion. She blamed everyone, including herself, for the death of her sister. Even God, once an omnipotent blazing light that she struggled to see, was now impotent; a cartoon sun scribbled by a small child. She crowded him with dark clouds and stuffed him in the top corner of her desolate world, while down below was where life really happened. Bombs still exploded and buildings collapsed.
When Betty started seeing things that were not really there, I ventured into my backyard at night and used field guides to determine how I fit into such unfathomable darkness. I charted the paths of stars, searching for meaningful connections between the brightest points of light in the observable universe: a wandering bear with her cub, a scorpion sent by a goddess to kill a hunter; even a war-like man with the body of a horse. Sometimes the points of light that I tried to connect were not in the sky, but in the haunting face of Guernica’s weeping woman whose teardrop eyes are haphazardly tossed across her face, seemingly an afterthought of Picasso’s creation. When I look deep into the eyes of this mother, I see only a blackhole around which every star in the universe rotates. Nothing can escape the gravitational pull of her gaze, not even light; she draws death and destruction into her spiraling arms: a wounded horse writhes in the dust, a dead soldier stares up at the sun; the angry bull morphs into a wooden table, its tail a wispy trail of smoke. Even the burning building leans into her gaze. When the mother can take in no more of the suffering world, she tilts her head back to scream. Her eyes shift to her forehead. They are in danger of slipping off her face because the conventional laws of the universe are no longer true—sometimes husbands hit their wives.
Sometimes husbands hit their wives and lie about it.
It is no surprise that I am caught off balance when my comfortable worldview is shattered, forcing me to reevaluate not only my beliefs and interpretations of experiences, but also my expectations. I imagine this sort of disorientation, even disbelief, occurred when Basque soldiers warned civilians that if the sky above Gernika was clear—a bright day in early spring, for example, that would normally fill a winter-worn soul with hope—there would likely be unimaginable death and destruction. Because German military pilots had neither the training nor the technology to safely navigate their war planes through low clouds or bad weather, it seems that Picasso’s indifferent Eye of God was already gazing down on Gernika when Basques looked up at the beautiful blue sky on April 26, 1937; instead of feeling the warmth of a life-giving sun on their skin, they watched in horror as the Nazis dropped bombs on them.
When Picasso first sketched his composition of Guernica on the canvas, he did not include a sun shining down on the dark battlefield. Only in later versions of the painting would the artist separate light from the darkness, and so—at least in the beginning—the sky over Guernica was still white with the gesso he used to prime his canvas. In the area of the painting where Picasso would eventually position the Eye of God, he first sketched the raised arm and clenched fist of an angry soldier whose body, not yet mortally wounded, is stretched across the foreground. Picasso later painted over the clenched fist raised to the sky, telling a much different story of the man. In the final composition, the body of the wounded soldier that was once whole and softly curved, is now hopelessly fractured from the exploding bombs. Instead of raising his fist in anger and defiance, the man clutches a broken sword and desperately reaches for help beyond the canvas. Most people who view Guernica have no idea that Picasso painted over the soldier’s clenched fist with the fragments of a wounded horse, its head yanked back in a scream; most people believe what they see in front of them.
I have always questioned whether Betty really had schizophrenia. It seems plausible, given the early 1980s, that her medical community did not believe her when she said that her husband was abusive. Vernon could have easily lied; he could have said that Betty was delusional in order to cover up his own domestic violence. Could this have been why she was institutionalized? Was this why she escaped the concrete walls of her psychiatric hospital and killed herself—because no one listened to her? Of course, it is entirely possible, assuming that Betty really did have schizophrenia, that she experienced delusions of physical abuse. Vernon may very well have been a kind and loving man, but I wonder if there is more than one truth to this story. Perhaps the beatings from Betty’s husband made my aunt more susceptible to the onset of schizophrenia, or—even more difficult to fathom—is the possibility that if Betty really did experience delusions, Vernon may have tried to beat them out of her in desperation. Regardless of why my aunt took her own life, she lived during a time when most people were unable to have conversations about mental illness and domestic abuse. We did not have the vocabulary. We did not have the tools. We did not even have the courage to search for the vocabulary or the tools. Limited in our knowledge and blinded by heightened emotions, we clung to misconceptions, societal biases, and shameful stigmas.
We are still limited by every kind of faulty perception, and so—while my mother shut herself from the world, content to sink into her soft circles of light—I endured peculiar obsessions, surrounding myself with an existential darkness that seemed to only expand, ad nauseum in proportion to my insatiable desire to understand my past. Eventually, I began to see the glaring Eye of God in places other than Guernica: a small area in the middle of my forehead, slightly above my furrowed brow that is supposed to represent, at least in some cultures, intuition or perception beyond ordinary sight—and then, even more unlikely, in the vast expanse of a dying star: NGC 7293, otherwise known as the Helix Nebula.
The closest planetary nebula to Earth, NGC 7293 was nicknamed the Eye of God when the Hubble Space Telescope sent back to Earth images of what appeared to be an enormous human eye in the universe, the white dwarf in its center a spectacular aquamarine iris. As the dying star continues to burn off its remaining nuclear fuel, the core emits inner bands of white dust and gaseous fumes that form the sclera of the eye; the outer yellow, orange, and red bands mimic fleshy lids. These bands unravel and stretch across an incomprehensible distance in space—across time, really, because what we see occurred in the past, nearly three years ago. The Eye of God nebula is so large that to view it, scientists had to piece together a composite of photographs from both the Hubble Telescope and observatories on Earth.
In 2020, through the process of data sonification—where digital information, normally transcribed into visual images, is instead expressed as sound—NASA astronomers discovered how to hear the Eye of God nebula, resulting in an audio translation of digital information that moves from left to right across the span of a photograph. When astronomers played this audio interpretation of the Helix Nebula, they discovered something that most would say is unsettling—even disturbing. The Eye of God sonification begins with what sounds like movement underwater, perhaps a drowning; and then, as the audio inches closer to the center of the nebula, it emits the high-pitched shriek of a woman as she disappears among the ruins of the universe.
While most people would recoil from the wail of this weeping woman—really a chorus of weeping across the universe—either dismissing it with a nervous laugh or mocking sarcasm, the audio transcription of a dying star helps me to imagine what it might be like for God to experience the depth and duration of human suffering since the beginning of time, and love us with that kind of unfathomable endurance. This God, unlike the static electric bulb that dangles over the weeping woman in Guernica, is dying along with us in a stunning cosmic light that began hundreds of millions of years ago. I find this all strangely reassuring and beautiful, until the vertical playhead—a moving zig-zag line that shows the current playback position in the audio track—abruptly stops.
Then there is nothing.
It is 1981, and my grandfather has just died of a massive heart attack. Betty and my mother stand in front of my grandmother in her farmhouse dining room. My grandmother points her Instamatic camera at them, directing the two sisters to stand still, mere hours after the burial of her husband. Both sisters do as they are told. Vernon is not present, but Betty wears mourning clothes—a floral print blouse and button-down blazer—that are the purplish-blue of a recent bruise. The faces of the two women are ashen in color and startled by the events of the day—what sort of woman takes photographs at funerals? They stand uncomfortably far from each other as they stare at the camera, pressing their lips tight. No one says a word. When my grandmother presses the shutter button on the camera, the magnesium filament in the flashcube ignites with a distinctly sharp sound—a small bird bone snaps—and the sisters are momentarily blinded. Instantly, the blood vessels at the back of their retinas are illuminated. Dark spots hurl across their field of vision—are those bombs?—and then they just as quickly vanish out of sight. The flash cube rotates and my grandmother’s roll of film advances to the next frame. When I look at the photograph years later, I can see more clearly. Their eyes are blood red.
With no other guidance from the NASA audio of the Helix Nebula, I am left to draw my own conclusions. God is once again silent, and we—as humans—are left to do the work, even bear the suffering of one another across vast expanses of fear, anger, and prejudice. In the cold vacuum of space that separates our differences, we are screaming—even shrieking—but no one seems to hear us, and so we burn through our lives like stars, fast and furious. This is not necessarily what I want to conclude when I listen to NGC 7293. Compassion, or suffering together, is painful; and so I shamelessly play the sound of the shrieking woman on an endless loop because I need to make sure that I have heard it correctly: We are all stumbling across desolate fields, squinting at something that is simply too bright to endure.
It is now the summer of 2024. I am spending an afternoon going through old photos with my cousin Victor who is six years younger than me, and the only child of Betty and Vernon. During the course of our conversation, I have a sinking feeling that Victor is protecting a small part of himself that is still a child, even though he will soon be fifty years old. My cousin tells me that he lives alone and has no interest in relationships of any form, but is very proud of the 35,000 comic books in his basement. While he talks about his favorite superheroes, I notice a prominent tattoo on his forearm that says Elixir, likely a reference to the Marvel character who has the ability to control the biological structure of any organic substance, including bringing people back from the dead.
I have probably only seen my cousin three times in thirty years, but as I was in the process of cleaning out my parents’ house—my mother recently moved into a nursing home, and my father died years ago—I asked him if there is anything he might like for his house. Instead, Victor said that he would appreciate a few photographs of his mother, if possible; he had very few in his possession. And so, as we look through my own mother’s albums at the dining room table, searching for images of this enigmatic woman of our past, I try to piece together a composite of what really happened in my childhood. At some point, though, I realize that I need to point out to Victor which photos are of his mother because he does not recognize her, including one close-up that is slightly out of focus; Betty is no more than twelve years old and is turned away from the camera, playful, her mouth wide open as if she were a roaring wild animal.
When Victor asks me if he can keep this rare find—a snapshot of his mother filled with joy—I remove it from the album and hand it to him but have neither the words nor the courage to speak; I am too caught up with my own childhood narrative, viewed safely through the lens of Guernica: Betty’s husband strikes her hard across the face. She loses her balance and hits her head on a wooden table. The table morphs into an angry bull and charges, tossing her against a house of cards with flames shooting through the windows. Her husband grabs a fistful of her long auburn hair and yanks her head back—or is it the seething bull that presses its hot breath in her ear?—until she sees a blinding light. What is that light above her body? Is it God? She needs the light to be God, but maybe it is only the unbearable sun—life, isn’t it all so bright and beautiful?—hurling dark spots across her eyes.
Victor then tells me about the last memory he had of his mother before she was institutionalized. He is nine years old and watching cartoons at Vernon’s parents’ house. Family members are conversing in the kitchen when Betty lunges at him on the couch and begins choking him with such force that it takes three men to stop her from killing him. Victor pauses at this point in his storytelling. He says that the memory that troubles him the most is not his mother’s high-pitched scream or even her hands around his throat as he gasps for breath; when Victor manages to look up at her from the couch, he sees something in her face that he does not recognize—or even think possible. He does not have the vocabulary. He does not have the tools. He doesn’t even have the courage to search for the vocabulary or tools; and so, from the perspective of a small child still watching superheroes fight villains and save lives, Victor tells me that what he saw was something demon-red—his beloved mother’s eyes.
During that afternoon of flipping through old photo albums, Victor questions why our families stopped spending holidays together. When I tell him that it was because we believed that his father—who died years ago at age sixty-six—was abusive, and that this contributed to Betty’s schizophrenia, Victor is surprised. His voice seems to lag behind his thoughts, as if he were reframing old memories with new information. Victor admits that his parents fought constantly and many dishes were thrown about the house, but he does not recall his father ever hitting his mother. In fact, Vernon gave him a different reason for his mother’s mental illness: Betty’s father, my own grandfather, molested her as a child.
Was this why my mother secluded herself and suffered so much anxiety?
Had she been molested, too?
As a child, I often stayed for several days at a time on my grandparents’ farm. My grandpa would come in from the field for lunch, and then sometimes take an afternoon nap in his bedroom. Did he ask me to take naps with him? I don’t remember doing this—I was afraid of him. And yet I must have been in that bedroom at some point, even though the door was always closed, because I remember being surprised that it was so much larger than other rooms in the farmhouse. I also remember, though, that my grandfather warned me never to wander into the cornfields where towering stalks eclipse the sun and stretch, indistinguishable, as far as the eye can see in any direction; I would quickly become disoriented—then lost.
My grandfather was right; the more I wander down each uncertain path, searching for truth and the presence of God in my past, the more I lose my way in the swirling dust; the very edges of my body seem to dissolve. And so, it seems that—like Picasso who surrounded an enigmatic section of Guernica with jagged brushstrokes, uncertain if the small white area was the blazing sun or an exploding bomb—not even I can identify what I have created in this story. It nears an end, still in darkness, with erratic brushstrokes slashed across an unfinished canvas.
Maybe I am the one who sees things that are not really there.
It is now late afternoon. I turn to another page of the last album that I will share with Victor, and am struck by the black-and-white image of my mother as a child, stumbling and hiding something important behind her back. Most people who look at this photograph would say that what she sees in front of her is merely the glaring sun above a desolate field, but perhaps my mother is squinting at something else that she cannot quite see clearly. It may not even be the incomprehensible death of her quiet sister, but the compassion of her only child who is reaching out to her from the future. There is a dark shadow in the bottom corner of the image that is likely the photographer turned away from the sun, but maybe this dark shadow is me, the edges of my body not yet fully formed. Maybe this is my soul, still nothing more than a swirling mass of dust that is simply too difficult for my mother to envision as she squints up at the sun and then stumbles over the barren field.
Is this love? Is this what it looks like?
Who can really see what is in front of us?
It is all too bright.
Jean McDonough is a school librarian who is working on a collection of nonfiction inspired by Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica.” Essays within this series have been published in journals such as “Colorado Review,” “Water~Stone Review,” and “Catamaran.” Several of her “Guernica” essays have also received writing awards, including finalist for Ruminate’s 2022 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize; notable in “The Best American Essays,” 2023; several Pushcart Prize nominations, and selection in the forthcoming “The Best of Delmarva Review,” 2024. For more information about Jean, visit www.jeanmcdonough.com.
