Painting the sky

On making a book cover for "A Counter of Moons: living with the unimaginable - the suicide of my son" by Iona Winter, 2025, Steele Roberts Aotearoa Publishers.

Painting the sky

Outside, the sea is calm. A shushing which travels through the open door. A blue in the back of my mind, the white fluff of foam, ever there. Here for you, when you need me. The sea.

There’s a smell of clean air-carried salt, a faint tone of grass and the cedar scent of macrocarpa in sunlight.

I chink the calligraphy brush against the glass of the old honey jar, and let paint sweep an inverted night sky into being. Gold at the centre for life. Gold for the connecting threads and for the starlight we can all claim as our own. Gold to house the space of loss. Gold for the small discs and half discs and quarter discs that will be the moon in all of her phases.

In the round of the new moon I paint the deep emptiness of loss. Black and red fusing with a blue night. At each phase of the moon I add colour. Purple for pain. Black for incomprehensibility. Orange for fear. Red for rage. Bewildering blue. All of it flowing out. I am sunk deep and hypnotic. I am honouring Iona’s life, Reuben’s life, mine, and all of our lives, connected in threads of starlight, in a shimmering web, and how we feel it when one of us suicides.

Please don’t —

But it is too late to summon these words.

YOUR LIFE MATTERS.

I hail them into the sky.

Reuben is gone.

So I paint for him, for his mother Iona, for his grandmother Kaye. For all of us. I am painting what will eventually be the cover of Iona Winter’s new book: A Counter of Moons: living with the unimaginable — the suicide of my son.

Detail from Moons by Kirstie McKinnon, watercolour on paper.

Paint becomes:

honouring

release

companionship

being alongside

loss.

I paint to sit with. I paint to acknowledge. This is the infinite whirling through the finite. A thing that can’t be fixed, and which must be attended to.

Your life matters.

How can we transmit these words to each other, so that they are felt in every cell? To you now reading this.

You are the caterpillar endlessly chewing the leaf.

You are the bee in wordless dance.

You are the grass in the field gone to seed.

Your tears are the one and one and one of the ocean.

Part of all.

Loved.

Will we take courage to enter our pain? Will we go into the dark places, to tend our wounds? In the dark, in the tending, we may find sentences there, words buried under rocks, under long fallen dreams. In the earth beneath our hopelessness and pain, each grain sings: you are loved, your life matters, you are the gold.

All these things flow through me while the sea shushes, and I paint a crater like a star in the surface of the moon.

I didn’t know you.

I miss you.

I needed you.

You needed me.

Sentences sinking into cells.

*

Iona Winter and I talk on the phone at length. One image from our conversation stays with me: people crossing the road so that they didn’t have to speak to her after her son Reuben died.

What makes us cross the road?

What makes us turn towards the awkward moment - to acknowledge another’s pain?

*

I have crossed the road in the face of pain. Years ago when a friend was dying, I did not go to visit her. I gave myself many reasons. At her funeral, I saw my lies: I wouldn’t be able to handle it; she wouldn’t want to see me; I didn’t know her that well; I feared the engulfment of my own emotions; I worried I would have nothing to say, or say the wrong thing; I worried that I would make it worse. At my friend’s funeral, I talked with a former colleague about wrapping ourselves in blankets, about the need for comfort. As I stood with the others to sing the waiata of farewell, I felt deep, profound and levelling regret. I vowed next-time to show up at the door. Mostly I have done this. [I don’t think I’m talking here about the deep global pain, the wars and atrocities currently before us, I honestly still don’t know how to respond to all that is, and then sometimes I respond with something that feels pathetic. I regularly feel helpless, like a grain of sand rattling in a jar]. I do think I am talking about those I know, my friends, the ones beside me, my neighbours. Turning towards pain often feels like stepping through a fence in the mind; and usually all I do is simple acknowledgement: “Can I just acknowledge your loss.”

I remember once after a deep loss of my own, a retired vicar held my hands as I entered the church. I was deep in grief. I don’t know why I went to the church, maybe to find a small pool of silence. She held my hands, looked into my eyes, she did not speak. I saw that she saw my pain, and was able to simply hold me for a moment with the gentleness of her eyes. I will never forget the wordless compassion in her irises: green and gold and brown. I see it, I see how it hurts you. It was enough.

Acts like this take courage.

Courage to sit alongside another in pain, and be with, and not try to fix it.

I love to fix-it. So there is also:

Restraint. No stories, no encouraging words, no time-heals.

Courage, and restraint.

And maybe a hand in a hand, and maybe tears.

These things are enough.

*

Who am I to say these things? I am one barnacle on a rock. I am a moth landing in the tussock in the dark. I am a dunnock hidden within the shield of a macrocarpa hedge.

And my life matters. Like yours.

Interview coming up

Later in July I will post an interview with Iona Winter as she talks about her new book A Counter of Moons: living with the unimaginable — the suicide of my son. 2025. Steel Roberts, Aotearoa.

Exhibition at the Dunedin Botanic Gardens

During July until the end of August 2025 I have some works on display at the Dunedin Botanic Gardens shop. The exhibition is called: Peaceful Flight in the Botanic Gardens.

Class Coming Up: Art for the Terrified

During September/October I will be running a 6 week Dunedin-based course called: Art for the Terrified. The course will be for those who wish to make art, but don’t know how to start. We will look at tuning-in to emotion, and using non-word techniques to express and examine ideas. The course is open to absolute beginners, and established makers of art. It is free for paid subscribers of A History of Kindness, $60 for everyone else. Send me a message to register your interest.

Apologies to those of you who don’t live in Dunedin, New Zealand, I’m not yet ready to start running online courses.

More details to follow.

Thank you for reading!

Kirstie