by David Sanders
For almost twenty years the Denver Hospice featured a bi-annual auction of masks created by artists and celebrities across the country. Through the Mask Project they raised millions of dollars. I was curious if there was a connection between the creation of masks and the mission of hospice care.
Durning the heyday of the Mask Project, my colleague, an exceptional therapist who shared the office I worked in, was diagnosed with a rare lung cancer. She was shocked as she had never smoked. How could she have lung cancer as she took exquisite care of her body and mind? After a round of intense treatment, she entered remission. She returned to the office, and we would pass each other as she left the office for the day and I would arrive. She came to our home for a Shabbat dinner, and I looked at her face as it radiated in the glow of the light candles. Not long after that evening, the cancer returned.
The recurrence was devastating. She knew what it meant. She was a very private person who did not want any sympathy. I visited her at the Denver Hospice a few days before she died. There was an aura about her, an equanimity as she was ready to depart. Her visage pale and drained of life. There was the connection, the mask of the body was lifting. She sparkled in the sunlight drifting in through the half open curtains.
I have not thought about my colleague until this past weekend at the Kabbalah Experience annual event. As we planned our annual events over the years, we had discussed that one day we might host a Mask Project. Melanie kept that idea in mind and over the last few months she, and a group of volunteers, enlisted 50 artists and celebrities to create masks. I participated, as did Melanie, in contributing masks.
I looked at the blank slate of a mask, held it in my hands and traced its contours with my fingers. I was waiting for it to speak to me. What did I want to convey through the mask? Perhaps every artist was asking the same question. Finally, I sat for a few enjoyable hours executing the design. When the mask was finished, I realized that what I was putting on the mask was less important than what I was taking from the mask. I would be donating the mask, sending it on its way to adorn a wall in someone’s home or perhaps be placed, even secreted away, and glanced at occasionally. What I received was immeasurably more.
For all the years we have delved into the “masks you wear and those that wear you” this experience of painting a mask was an incomparable way into experiencing the (many) masks I have chosen to create and embody. As we teach, there are many masks we are born with and those we can modify but not change. There are the many masks chosen for us or the ones we choose. Those we have some say over if we listen carefully to what those masks have to say to us.
This awareness was amplified at the event when one of the artists was bereft that someone had outbid her during the auction for her own mask. The thought had crossed my mind of bidding on my own mask, it was a part of me, but I had resisted because it was after all only a mask. She relayed to me with sadness that she wanted to keep her mask and had every intention of donating through acquiring it for herself. She told me that the mask was her life story, that she had poured her soul into the making of “her” mask. Can a mask contain our soul? What we come to realize through the study of masks, and making them, that it always has and always will, till death do us part.
You are invited to join David and Melanie in a special four-week “Masks Workshop” this Spring, at Kabbalah Experience. Register today- class starts on 4/28.
