Anyone who knew Jack Critchfield recognized the indomitable nature of his being. Physically and emotionally, he was someone who endured whatever he had to and, ultimately overcame every obstacle to achieve whatever he set out to do.

Jack's diagnosis and progressive illness defied natural order, disrupting everything that made sense. Or so it seemed. He wanted to live and worked to beat his illness more than he had ever worked for anything in his life. And he kept getting sicker. Even as it was happening, those of us who knew him couldn't believe it. And then he died, disrupting everything that made sense.

In the images in this collection, Cathy expresses her pain with the same openness and emotional honesty with which she and Jack lived. Surrender to loss of this magnitude is never willing; we surrender because there is no other choice. Ultimately, nature will have her way with us.

This, after all, is the deeper natural order. Death is terrifying, wondrous, awesome, and inevitable; nature's final embrace. She commands it and thus it is so.

It is most remarkable that this collection of works is not bleak. Indeed, many of these pieces are radiant. Perhaps it is true, death illuminates life. Within the depths of loss, light shines through Cathy's life and work. And the origin of this light is also nature, the unfathomable reality that is our mother. The same force that commands our surrender and is the source of our grief loves us beyond comprehension and beyond limit.

Themes of the heart and blood, eyes and tears weave throughout this collection. Death takes us to the heart of the matter, revealing the sacred core - le sacre coeur - of life. We become heartsick when someone we love is seriously ill and heart-broken when death takes him or her from us. Our hearts beat out the rhythm of our lives. Our hearts are the metronome of our mortality; marking time, each beat bringing us closer to life's end.

We engage the world with our eyes but are unable to close them when the unthinkable occurs. Tears well as we witness the suffering of our parents, our lovers, our children, and our friends. Tears flow without end as we grieve their passing and our loss.

In grief we pour soul into soul. The blood of those we have loved, and love still, and our tears sanctify the earth which receives them. The fluids of our bodies and souls fertilize the ground on which we walk, the earth from which all life springs.

Without once turning away from pain, Cathy ultimately communicates hope. Not even hope for life renewed or joy recovered, but an unshakable confidence in what is. Creation continues to unfold and, without being asked, we are full participants. The fullness of life is it's own meaning. As this remarkable collection conveys, there is hope in that.

Ira Byock is a Principal Investigator, Missoula Demonstration Project, Author of Dying Well, Riverhead-Putnam 1997, www.dyingwell.org.

What does grief look like? by Ginny Merriam

What  does grief look like? Cathy Weber shows us.           

Grief looks like a woman split open, blood and water pouring from her, draining her with no end. Grief paralyzes her, roots in her wound, takes her heart. It cloaks her with its gray weight of sorrow. After a long time, it begins to recede and frees her slowly. It will stay forever, turned into memory, an oddly unfathomable blessing. 

Cathy met Jack in 1981, when she was working as a carpenter and he came to the same job as an electrician. The next summer, he took her out for a birthday dinner; romance found them. Cathy, who asked for a drill for her 16^th birthday, makes things of beauty – practical things of wood and nails, and soulful things of paint and parchment. Jack had big hands, big arms, a big heart and a big sense of justice. He had a love for his work that made installing a light switch an act of devotion. Through 15 years of passionate dance through life, Cathy and Jack worked, hiked, camped, fished, packed mules, fought, started a house and had a son, Rio. 

“We just really liked each other,” she says. “He was just a great guy. There was nothing he couldn’t do. And I enjoyed his company.” 

When a lump in Jack’s arm brought the ominous medical words “soft tissue sarcoma” into their lives, Cathy wouldn’t allow the idea that it could win. She did everything, charting medicines, drawing blood at home and traveling from Dillon to Seattle, Chicago, New York and Tijuana with him. Each step was a reflection of her hope in launching the next decision and treatment. Cathy pregnant and Jack sick, they threw themselves into each next day. 

Until the day he died two years later, Cathy resisted thinking that Jack could be taken from her. When he was, on Aug. 17, 1996, she had a seventeen-month-old baby, rental property, a retail store, a farm, a studio and gallery, an unfinished house, an unsettled estate – and an ocean of grief. 

During her hours of waiting at Jack’s bedside in strange cities, Cathy created with embroidery. Three of these finished works are included in this collection, Treetop Dream, When Blood and Water Brought Hope and Living in Blood and Water. But Jack’s death left Cathy paralyzed. 

“You cry and you cry, and you bleed and you bleed,” she says. “You cry, and your heart breaks.” 

A student of art from her Indianapolis childhood through her University studies and apprenticeship in Mexico City, Cathy, at 40, had never before been unable to make art. Now, she had to operate on faith that grief would go away, that she would be herself again, that she would make art and raise Rio. She thought of writer Terry Tempest Williams, who tells us, “Faith becomes a teacher in the absence of fact.” 

In the fall, long-time friend and Missoula gallery owner Geoff Sutton called. “You’re doing a show here in a year,” he told Cathy, “It is not too soon to start working.” Her old habits and practices sustained her. Her return to working on botanical subjects gave way to the first ideas and sketches for the paintings about grief. 

Cathy’s love for illuminated texts has been visible in her work for a decade. Painting on skin parchment for its ability to show the paint on its surface without absorbing it, she has borrowed text from cubist poet Gertrude Stein. She didn’t intend to use text in the grief paintings, and the first, Blood, Tears, Lilies, begins the series without it. But when she went back to Stein’s words, she found inspiration. They surround the blood and water of  Wearing Grief on the Outside, where the sightless figure is an empty shell with her weeping heart and eyes draped over her. While the words are objects in the painting, pieces of them escape to startle us: “widow in a wise veil,” “without a blaming there is no custody.” 

The artist believes her work often emerges without passing through the filter of conscious thoughts and that she learns about her own experience from the paintings. This series is no different. Slowly, she started to see herself as a scholar of mourning. She began to understand that grief was its own being. It had its own weight, and it was accompanying her, walking with her, living with her, leaning on her. It shows itself as a gray cloak, mud-like, amidst the artist’s personal symbol for abundance, raspberries, in Grief’s Weight. 

One day after more than a year, Cathy looked in the mirror and saw herself looking back – not a suffering, miserable person but a glimmering of herself. She felt a break in the misery, and she painted Occasional Calm, with the words of Stein: “A little calm is so ordinary and in any case there is sweetness and some of that.” 

We see still the waves of anguish and heartbreak in Heart’s Grief, where the figure cannot even embrace her child as she spins through days and nights of heartache. Then, a spring of sorts. In Reassembled Heart, pieces of the artist’s life begin to come back together. On the vital waves of parchment, the beginnings of new life take shape in a rough patchwork of a crudely-mended heart, flowers of summer and decorative border. 

That heart is still heavy, the paintings tell us, and the bed still too big to bear alone. With Jack gone, Cathy for a time would wander the house through the night’s darkest hours, gathering the courage to lie there, and we know and believe it when we look at Blood, Tears, Bed. Once there, under a patchwork of colors with the cloak of grief hovering, the past is both succor and torment in Comfort of Memory and Weight of Memory. Here, the artist says, “Sometimes the memories are a comfort, and sometimes they are no comfort.” 

At the end of the series, the heart is retrieved, dug from it’s spot underground under the blessing of the sun. It’s reassembled, better than the first try, and enshrined under the banner, “I fear no new days,” heralded by the butterflies of spring and supported by the ancient female symbol the alchemical rose. 

Cathy brings these paintings from the high, snow-streaked spring of the Beaverhead Valley, full of sky and the shy flowers that invite her to paint. She is turning to new images in her studio and to the comfort of old pursuits – organic gardening, cycling and tinkering with her house – with her small son, Rio. She is rich in family and friends and vital in body and intellect. The years of life with Jack, the big picture, feel like a blessing now. 

We who look at these paintings see ourselves. At the center of our humanity is the love we have for others. People and animals come into our lives, and we give our hearts, over and over. We suffer loss, each of us, and our skins grow around the wounds, making them a part of us, and we give our hearts again. We share it all in our art and in our literature. 

“You go through this,” Cathy says, “and you feel so alone and so terrible. But it’s common as dirt. As grass. As air.”

Ginny Merriam is a Missoula area journalist who has written extensively about the arts, culture and medicine.