back in 2014, i bought a solar butterfly light to put in the ground at frank's grave at fernwood cemetery in royersford. i had it in the trunk of my car all of the time and kept meaning to get to the cemetery, yet being too busy to live across many jobs and the rest of life meant my goal didn't happen as planned.
but a few months ago, i finally took the light out of my car and set it up to test it out, hoping to get to the cemetery soon afterward. i found out right away, in the dark of autumn and winter, that the light is so comforting and lifts my energy upward on hard days. it automatically knocks my stress down a good bit when i see it. and i realize this is because it reminds me of frank and that life shouldn't be as hard as it often feels, it's beautiful, it's inspiring, and it reminds me of my mom, too, who died when i was 20 and absolutely loved butterflies.
a few months before we lost frank in the physically typical sense, he told me he wanted to paint a picture of my mom. he knew i missed her very much and that she was the only parent i ever had. i gave him a copy of the photograph of her below as a little girl, which means the world to me, and i find it so beautiful. soon afterward, frank translated it into a painted form, which you can see below the photograph.
frank
also said that he felt curiously connected to my mom as he painted her, in some
unique, different kind of way, and he never met her because she died before i met him. i also never heard
him comment anything like this with other portraits and people.
it is said that butterflies carry messages to the other side. i've always felt that frank and my mom are more connected now in a way they couldn't be as much in our more dense realm. and the tie-in of butterflies here helps my heart. i hope the butterfly solar light eye-scene does the same for you as you read these words. i do plan to finally take it to the cemetery, but i'm also considering buying another one and keeping the original in my yard because of the comforting, good feelings it stirs when i glimpse it at night, especially in the cold of winter, when it's surprisingly still full of energy to be lit even as we hardly have much sun across these weeks.
