The Art of Aging: Mothers of Invention

Josephine died in September, and since then Jo has returned to her studio in the bank building. She says that her colors and lines have clarified. “I’m coming out of the fog,” she says, explaining that painting is her way of healing.

The final months with her mother, with whom she’d sometimes had a rocky relationship over the years, were certainly filled with much of their own healing balm. The nurses, who were present, often told Jo that they wanted her around when they died. But Jo doesn’t think she was doing anything that unusual, just keeping her mother in the present.

“When people are dying,” she says, “they’re on the edge. They can get to the essence of things.” This ability is lost to many of us during the day-to-day of our lives, or greatly dimmed, but Jo Myers-Walker seems to have tapped into it long before her time.

Art courtesy of Jo Myers-Walker