I don’t share photos of people grieving leaving a funeral or outside of a hospital when a loved one is sick… You can do your job and have an opinion and have it be strong, but not be hurtful or cruel.
When a loved one disappears, you continue to live with the accompaniment of that person. One has to find a balance between joy and sorrow.
Dreams, I would say, are probably the most prevalent way a loved one will try to deliver a message.
I think writers process their own experiences through the characters and situations they write. So for Batman, I used my own experience of losing a loved one. Grief is a strange place; it’s like an altered state. You might sleep too much, so you can see the dead in your dreams.
Robert Mapplethorpe, I met in 1967. He was a student at Pratt, though even as a student a fully formed artist. We went through many things in our life together. He became my loved one, then my best friend.
I think everyone understands grief, the journey it takes us on, whether it’s the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, a disappointment. Some people don’t deal with it, the power of it. Some do. Some feel the weight of it and it informs their choices. I’ve had to open up to grief in different contexts.
It’s fun living the life and traveling and getting to do things that I otherwise probably would never do but it comes with a cost of loss of privacy and being away from loved one a lot.
It is difficult to ever think about your loved one having suffered.
Grief at the absence of a loved one is happiness compared to life with a person one hates.
Oftentimes reoccurring dreams are ways a loved one is trying to come through and deliver a message.
I hate Alzheimer’s. It is one of the most awful things because, here is a loved one, this is the woman or man that you have loved for 20, 30, 40 years, and suddenly, that person is gone. They’re gone. They are gone.
If you think of life and death on a continuum, finding the point where it tips is complicated. It cuts across all political lines and gets to the root of our humanity. It requires faith informed by years of intimacy that you’re doing what’s right for your loved one.
Many of us have experienced the pain that comes with watching a loved one suffer with a serious illness. We also know that we would do absolutely anything it takes to help them beat it.
Time is the most valuable thing in life because it never comes back. And whether you spend it in the arms of a loved one or alone in a prison cell, life is what you make of it.
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