In 1976, Zoë heard that a friend was stranded and struggling in the Appalachian Mountains. She drove there. She spent a week drawing. At the end of the week, she brought Kathleen home.
In 1976, Zoë was living in the Florida Keys. She got word that a friend of hers had moved to the Appalachian Mountains to find life and love, but instead found isolation and a horrible man. Zoë decided to head north and spend a week with Kathleen, hoping to convince her to leave and come back with her to Florida.
Kathleen contacted me and described that week while Zoë drew the Goldminer. She said Zoë would explain in great detail the densities of the lead in each of her pencils and how it would translate to a different shade of gray. Zoë sat at a big empty cable spool turned on its side while she drew on top of it, her face very close to the paper as she made her pencil marks. Kathleen depicted a scene with Zoë drawing at the front door, a cool breeze blowing her hair, and an orange sky in the background, fading into the rolling hillsides swept with tall grass.
Kathleen mentioned that the reflection in the gold pan was added only at the very end, after a long period of Zoë staring at the piece in silence. I can’t help but think that Zoë felt she needed something more… something more compelling to convince Kathleen to come back to Florida. To show Kathleen that there is no gold to be found in a bed of thorns.
At the end of the week, Kathleen went back with Zoë to Florida.
The print shop worker who named the picture. The word he chose changed everything Luke thought he understood about the year before his own birth. This is one of the shortest chapters — and one of the most striking.
I worked with Andrew at the print shop that would scan and print Zoë’s pictures. I would bring one in and he and I would stand and stare in silence. I would ask him what he thought the name of the pictures should be. When I asked him about this one, he looked down expressionless and said, “Abortion.”
The year on the picture is one year before my birth. Later that day after talking with Andrew, I told my dad about what he had said, and my dad revealed to me for the first time about the abortion he and Zoë had in 1982.
A wedding gift that its recipient couldn’t bear to look at. Hidden behind another picture in the same frame for decades — until Batman’s daughter found it and reached out to send it back.
My dad worked with Batman (David). He made a name for himself fixing things while hanging upside down above stages at rock shows. He and my dad were good friends; Zoë and his wife, Diane, were better friends. Zoë had given them this picture as a wedding present.
Maybe Batman thought it was a reminder of a failed marriage, or maybe it was the eagle eye staring at him, judging. Whatever his reason, he found it to be too much to look at and stored it behind another picture, inside the same frame, never to be seen.
Amy, Batman’s daughter, found it and reached out to me, offering to return it, to which I said yes. After decades of Amy and I not communicating, we were reunited through this art.
The longest chapter, and the most complicated visit. Cheri and Scott. Tequila and snow. Dark confessions and beautiful memories, told without filter by people who had always lived without one.
A few months later, I drove from Eden, Utah to Whitefish, Montana to deliver a print of the Dandelion Wasp to Cheri. Cheri’s dad was a pilot who lived in San Francisco during the ‘70s and ‘80s. The pilots would leave their children with other pilots’ families as a means of relaxation and/or accommodating work travel. Both having pilots for fathers, Cheri and Zoë would enjoy free or very cheap travel and became regular travelling companions and life long friends.
On the way to Whitefish, I stayed in a cabin surrounded by nothing but snow-covered wilderness for a 20-mile radius. I wanted to see how it felt to be that one light when you look down at night from an airplane as you fly over an otherwise black landscape.
It reminded me of a story about Zoë and her friend Lyn, who pulled over on the side of the road to look at a rainbow over a cornfield. With giggles and arms waving, Zoë ran towards the rainbow like a child in a fairytale.
My snowfield was her rainbow.
I didn’t know much about Cheri other than I was to be careful around her. I was told that she was a trigger for Zoë and that Cheri was a loose cannon.
Cheri lived with her husband Scott in a two-story house on a large lot caked in snow.
While Cheri was showing me the digital art she’d been creating on her computer, mostly as a distraction to keep her mind off her recently deceased father, Scott came in to announce that his grandson had been diagnosed with autism. Cheri was too engulfed in her work on the computer to give an appropriate reaction, or any reaction really.
Later, as a thank you for their hospitality, I gave them three large bottles of tequila left over from the party in Eden I came from. I would later find out that her husband Scott had been hospitalized for drinking copious amounts of tequila. I didn’t know what to do. Should I have taken the bottles back? Dumped them out? I ended up leaving them there and hoping it wouldn’t start a problem.
One morning, Scott and I went for a snowy walk around the neighborhood where we found ourselves in a serious heart-to-heart conversation despite only knowing each other for all of three hours. Me confessing my failing marriage, and he about his wife and regrettable decisions in life. Maybe that’s what made it easier – telling your deepest darkest secrets to a complete stranger. It was refreshing.
I asked Cheri about Zoë. She had many beautiful stories of her and Zoë traveling the world together and how close she had been with Zoë’s family. But she also had some very dark stories. She would describe herself walking into Zoë’s art room and seeing Zoë leaning over a bucket, cutting her forearms and letting the blood drip into it. I knew Zoë did this but had never seen it for myself. I’d only seen the aftermath, of white bandaged arms and slanted looks from neighbors.
On a trip to get a new router for Cheri and Scott, Cheri told me that she thought my dad killed my mom. I stared at the routers in front of me with a straight face just like I did when Scott announced his grandson was autistic. I eventually thanked her for her candor. In hindsight, I understand her theories. According to Cheri, Zoë was always worried about some girl named Barbrö, who was Dick’s brother’s ex-wife. Shortly after Zoë passing away, Dick married Barbrö.
I didn’t have the words to describe a lifetime of hardship and sacrifice my dad had dedicated to Zoë, but I knew Cheri’s allegation not to be true.
I found a note at the bottom of Zoë’s jewelry box. In typewriter font, it said:
I love you Zoë I want you to get better
I don’t care how long that takes I will do anything I can to help this happen I will never leave you I will make whatever changes to myself to make all the above happen Never give up but have patience But most important of all, I love you Zoë
(see you soon, Dicki Bird)
When I unfolded the note, a bloodstained razor fell out of it. Until then, everything about my mother and her thoughts seemed intangible and potentially a figment of my imagination. But picking up that razor made it all feel very real. I had visions of my mom digging it into her forearm while she read the note, maybe crying. I had visions of my dad struggling to know what to do, how to help, and this note being just one of the many ways he tried.
Before I left, I showed Scott and Cheri some slides I had scanned from Zoe’s travels to California. The slides showed Scott and Cheri with Zoë during their high school years doing high school things. Despite the psychological intensity of the last few days, these pictures brought a big calm to it all. As they viewed the pictures, I could feel them breathing life back into what was and what still could be.
Although filled with antics, I really enjoyed my time with Cheri and Scott. Their unedited and vigorous approach to life, love, and tragedy… was refreshing, and reminded me of myself.
After two years and fifteen people, Luke returns to the question he started with: who was his mother? This final chapter is not an answer — but it is something better than one.
During the two years it took to find all the pictures in this book, I’ve learned more about Zoë than I’d ever planned. And yet, I yearn to know her more. There are at least a dozen more pictures being cared for by equally amazing and interesting people as those in this book. From painful stories of depression and suicide, to intense battles with alcoholism, to her one-day employment at Disney, to the eagles she painted on the gas tanks of a biker gang. There are a lifetime of stories I want to know more about.
I started this journey feeling the relationship with my mother was incomplete. And it still is. It will always be incomplete, and that’s okay. Every good relationship is an ever growing mountain of shared experiences you have with someone. In life and in death.
The shared experience is a very powerful thing. Unconditional empathy for another about specific things and specific people. When Zoë died, or maybe before, I decided to give up on that shared experience. I didn’t think there was anything more to gain from it.
But through the art in this book, the names in this book, and through me… Zoë continues to share herself and her experience with all of us.
