"My Mother's Last Bed" (Fall 2022 Intima) is a painting of a body almost glowing with a flame of amber, coral and luminous blue. "Driving" (Fall 2018 Intima) is a poem about hope, dread and dark humor. Both of these works spoke truth to me. I only realized later that the artist and poet were the same person, author and artist Meg Lindsay. How apropos.
I knew my computer's digital screen flattened the complexity of Lindsay's oil painting. Were the colors even rendered accurately? I could only imagine how hills and valleys of layered paint interacted with light.
"It took me twenty minutes to drive over," said Lindsay of the day her mother died. Her mother was eighty-eight and had dementia. They had a difficult relationship. "Her corpse was in the bed, and the light was coming in," said Lindsay. "It was just an impression. I was so struck by light and what was left behind when someone passes. It's almost deflated, almost unrecognizable. Light and soul. I painted that very quickly. It's one shot."
In the painting, the headboard and footboard enclose the body lying between. It felt like an embrace. The flax-colored light in the window illuminated the body. It felt so familiar. It could have been my father's body. In my nonfiction work "Moving Day" (Fall 2025 Intima), I described a day toward the end of my father's life. For several months, he had been a patient in various hospitals. On that day, moving day, nothing seemed more important than to escape institutional, temperature-controlled rooms. I wanted him to feel the warmth of the sun.
Lindsay's poem "Driving" recalls a pivotal moment she experienced while caring for her husband with multiple myeloma. She wonders if he is dead in the passenger seat beside her, and she feels indecision, relief and guilt. She also recognized the humor of her situation. In the toughest moments of caregiving, humor helps us survive. "No this is funny," Lindsay once told her writing group, "It's okay to laugh. Dark humor is very important. You don't know what to do in that situation."
In painting and poetry, two art forms relatively unfamiliar to me, Lindsay used a language I immediately understood. She was a caregiver and someone left behind. Of the experience, Lindsay said, "I keep running around with a bunch of guys, we are making decisions about the afterlife, and no one’s ever been there.”
Christine Nguyen has performed her work live in San Francisco with Back Pocket Media and at LitCrawl Sebastopol. She won journalism awards from the Asian American Journalists Association, the Society of Professional Journalists-NorCal, and the San Francisco Press Club. She was born in Vietnam and practices medicine in San José, California. Her essay, Moving Day, appears in the Fall-Winter 2025-26 Intima.