Henry Dorn

My mother passed in July 2017 from cancer. Her entire life could be summarized as endeavoring against opposition. This was true even right up to the end as she battled the suffocating effects of lung cancer. As I sat in wait with her in the hospital during her final days, I became an active participant in her transition from this life to whatever comes next. It was there that I started to the write notes and ideas I felt about the experience, her journey, her unspoken strength, and her quiet inner beauty. These sketches, which were too difficult to encompass at the time, were put to the side until I was able to set to paper my thoughts about her final days. This work is for her.

Cancer sucks. There’s no nice way to say that. It comes like a thief in the night and enters like a pest, and then it proliferates. Before you know – It's everywhere! I spent a month with my mother in a hospital. She had lost a considerable amount of weight. Someone who always hummed and had melody in heart and could absolutely talk for hours was reduced to a silence, as if held captive as a gagged prisoner. In this work, I try to capture not the beauty we often try to find in the passing of a loved one, but the tumultuous, ravenous nature of this illness. There are moments that are dense and complex, dark and sometimes ugly. A menacing fugal idea that continues to proliferate – much in the way that cancer does. A rising melody like the sound of a ventilator helping to breathe when the body no longer has the capacity to do it on its own. The mechanical sounds of keys clicking and descending and ascending scales like rumbling of hospital equipment. Hint of the Dies Irae plainchant pointing to impending demise.

And yet – in all of this – I imagine my mother’s gentle spirit. The middle of the piece paints a picture of a still, suspended state. It harkens to my experience in the hospital at night, after all others are gone and all is quiet. The silence disrupted only by the occasional beeps of machinery. I tried to imagine my mother’s thoughts and envisioned this state of serenity led by a melody I could see her humming. This was her unspoken strength, still present in the face of death. This piece again gives way to the chaos of cancer, returning more ruthless than before. The turmoil starts to totally boil over, with all the components of the work bearing down one final time. As a final call of strength, the horns raise their bells to sound my mother’s melody (she was, herself, a hornist in school). The eminent end draws near, but not before a final nod to her and her life.

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