I won’t sugarcoat it: being the caregiver for someone going through a tough, prolonged illness is hard. I’ve been at this now for over seven months. For most of that time, I’ve stayed at home providing care and safety for my immunocompromised husband.

Writer, speaker and painter Suleika Jaouad has been a huge inspiration to me. She’s undergone two stem cell transplants for Acute Myeloid Leukemia, one at age 22 and the other ten years later. By no means can I compare my experience as caregiver to that of the patient, but I have learned a lot from her about how I might respond to being in relative “isolation,” which is what she had to endure for many months (and what Eddie and I have been going through since September). We stay at home as much as we did throughout the pandemic.

I’ve searched for ways to define Suleika’s mantra - survival is a creative act – for myself. Within that construct I’ve turned to painting.

I’ve been a photographer for more than six decades, and I’ve never professed to be any other type of artist. I’ve dabbled in drawing and painting for several years now but have received no formal training in either. The mediums are all quite dissimilar, and they ask different things of me.

Trying to get a handle on what those differences are - and responding to them in a fulfilling way - has become part of the creative process for me… part of surviving this long and lonely journey I find myself on these days.

After the first few months at home, I began to try, rather than backing away from my situation, embracing it and using it to my advantage. Mainly that meant incorporating a chunk of that time each day into my art practice. What could I do from home, knowing I was going to be here for a while? Suleika likes to say: don’t fight your limitations… try dancing with them.

(Hmmm... this could apply to just about everything.)

I bought an inexpensive easel and set it up in our apartment, put a furniture pad underneath it and brought some tubes of paint and some brushes home from my studio. Since I don’t think of myself as a painter, my expectations were low. I didn’t have subject matter in mind, I just knew I needed to move some paint around on the canvas. Giving myself permission to be a “bad artist,” I started by surrendering myself to the process and going wherever it took me.

So during bursts of free time from tending to Eddie, doing the laundry, walking Charlie, preparing meals, ordering groceries, taking Eddie to the hospital for labs, etc., I claimed my own time and began painting at home. (If you know Suleika’s story, you know she painted in her hospital room while in isolation recovering from her second transplant.) It takes practice to push through the doubts and insecurities, and I do that every time I stand in front of the easel. I tend to be a perfectionist, so learning to let go and embrace the process is a big leap for me.

I realized pretty quickly that the act of painting can be a way of journaling, similar to the way photography is for me. Before I knew it, I was making pictures of houses. I don’t need an art therapist to tell me what that's all about.

These three paintings are finished, I think. (I’m never quite sure when to stop.) Underneath each one is at least four other paintings.

That’s a lot of paint and a lot of process.

If you’d like to get acquainted with Suleika Jaouad and her work, I highly recommend reading her book “Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of Life Interrupted” and/or watching the documentary “An American Symphony,” a documentary about her and her husband Jon Batiste.

Survival is a creative act. – Suleika Jaouad