"Grieving with Bob Ross" by Trystan Popish

The afternoon of my grandmother’s funeral, my sisters, mom, nephew, and I decide to paint with a Bob Ross episode, hoping to dull our grief with bright colors, to soothe our broken spirits with his bulbous brown hair, his velvet voice and reassurances. The painting seems simple enough: a cabin in the woods in the light of the moon, a peaceful scene easily accomplished in a half-hour episode. Later, thirty minutes stretches into three hours of pausing and painting, rewinding and repainting, until falling away one by one we give up the ghost, each departing the table with some distorted portrait of our grief. My cabin in the woods looks like an outhouse, my sky a lake upon the ground. Soon only my mother sits alone, striving for perfection on the day she’s buried her mother’s ashes, an interment doubly done, an ending soon to be etched in stone. I watch her paint and wonder what future afternoon I’ll cue an eternal episode, pick up my brush, and try to put pain to canvas, letting Bob lull me into thinking just for a moment that even the trees could be happy that day. ————————————– Trystan Popish called us from Denver, CO. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems x.com/voicemailpoems bsky.app/profile/voicemailpoems.bsky.social instagram.com/voicemailpoems