The above image is a painting I recently completed and titled, “McSweeny Always Gets Caught.” This title is taken directly from something my mother would say anytime one of us kids got caught doing what we shouldn’t, and that somehow being part “McSweeny” meant that it was our fate to, well, always get caught, no matter what we did to hide our “crime.”
Fatality was a marked thing for my mom, now deceased, and she weaved her way through a life that seemed to also always be marked by it. Through her tempestuous marriage, her baffling kids, her omnipresent cigarettes, her fractured life, her ill-begotten fate.
I lost my mom 3 years ago this upcoming February 12th, and her above-mentioned quote still resonates with me as if heard for the first time. The dead have a way of haunting our conscious thoughts and her death was no exception. But more to the point, why am I writing this for? Is it an attempt at purging my existential “sturm und drang”? Is this writing expressed from a well of regret? The chance I had to tell her that I loved her in a letter I wrote? but which she decided to ignore—at least in my eyes—and after her passing my father returned the letter to me. Was this her way of communicating beyond the grave an acceptance of my professed love? A ”return to sender” sort of thing? But I know the letter was indeed read by her, and if by returning it to me after her death she reciprocated my epistolary expression of undying love, then so be it, I will take it as it is, because in that moment of return, this McSweeny always does get caught. Again and again.
BOWLBY BYTES 