What We Leave Behind

The walls of my home are lined with numerous museum-sized landscape paintings. My dad painted each and every one of them; beginning in his 50’s and discontinuing in his 70’s; when he could no longer distinguish colors well enough to paint.

His works are nothing short of masterpieces, and hundreds of his paintings are in the hands of dozens and dozens of local, and not so local patrons of the arts; scattered in hamlets and cities throughout Florida, (and possibly throughout the world). Daddy was so good he began displaying his murals on the walls of nearby banks and restaurants, along with his phone number, and they literally “sold like hotcakes.”

After my father’s death, (and for lack of a better word) he was “processed” at the crematorium, my house became his temporary “home,” until we could bring the family together and inter his ashes at his gravesite. Interestingly enough, I set his urn on the floor of my dining room; not five feet away from the table upon which we had celebrated his retirement two decades earlier.

Something about an urn full of cremains is unsettling to me; especially those of a loved one. I could not wait to walk my father’s ashes out the same door from whence I brought them in a few days earlier.

And in a lesser, though more attractive way, my dad’s paintings which line my walls exude something of an ethereal aura. My father’s brushstrokes are visible in all the colors of nature, and were applied with such forethought and artistic fervor, and even after all these years are as bright and compelling as they ever were.

And as I study each one individually, I can only wonder which among the four or five I own was accomplished first, and which last, what sort of circumstances and emotions my father experienced on a given day which aroused in him the need to paint each one, why he chose this wood, and not the other from which to construct the frames which surround them, why he chose red, instead of black to sign his name on a particular work.

And I think the quality and quantity of the landscapes my father left behind him speak volumes about not only his love for nature, but express an innate desire to impact a generation of people who were “still a twinkle” when he set brush to canvas, (and no doubt, he will go right on impacting multiplied generations which follow).

For whatever we in essence, leave behind, whether painting, homemade cabinet, crocheted comforter, or literary work speaks something of who we were and what we were about. And in a soothingly sweet way provides a hauntingly rich testimony to the sort of people we were, and the character with which we lived out our lives on this planet.


By William McDonald, PhD. Excerpt from "(Mc)Donald's Daily Diary" Vol. 15. Copyright Volumes 1-15.

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