Salutations: Remembering Betsy and Her Art

Preparing to launch a book is usually a happy and exciting – also scary – time. So it has been as I’ve worked over the last twelve months to take a third draft and make it shine. I really thought it was ready last fall – until a group of young beta readers convinced me, it still needed work. Okay, I thought. These revisions shouldn’t take long. (Famous last words!) I’d better line up a cover artist.

So, one day in the pool, I asked my friend Betsy Cox if she’d like to do the cover of my next book. I was nervous but emboldened because at our book club meeting the previous month, Betsy described herself to the visiting author as an artist saying, ‘I love making art and especially making art for friends.’ When I approached her about it, minutes before we all would huff and puff through a vigorous workout, her eyes widened. ‘I’d feel honored,’ she said. Gosh, Betsy. I was the one feeling honored!

We arranged a time to talk. What was I thinking? ‘It’s set in DC,’ said. ‘The first part of the year. So, I’m thinking cherry blossoms.’ I could practically see the lightbulbs coming on in Betsy’s brain. ‘The main character played a small role in Come Back,’ I went on, knowing Betsy’d read my first novel. ‘Small-town girl goes to the big city.’

‘What’s the title?’ she wanted to know.

‘Look Up,’ I said. ‘I’m pretty sure.’ Then, ‘I’m reading how I should develop a brand.’ I shrugged, not sure what that even meant. ‘So it’d be good if we could carry through some similar themes from the covers of my other novels. The moody sky? Sunset? Oh. I know a lot of people think pink when it comes to cherry blossoms. I am not a fan of pink!’

I went on to explain (complain) how for my food service job in college I was required to wear a pink shirt-waist uniform – even in the dishroom where one got covered with everything gross. The guys got to wear white jackets over their regular clothes – washed by the cafeteria employer. But girls wore pink dresses. Pepto pink. I had to hurry from class to get to work in time for the lunch shift, so while my classmates wore the bell-bottoms and football jerseys popular on our campus in the early 1970s, I wore a pink dress. In the winter. When I did not always have time to do laundry between shifts. A Pepto pink dress covered in dishroom atrocity. ‘So can we not make those cherry blossoms pink?’

Not long before, Betsy had invited me to join her lunch group – she and three other book club friends. She’d invited me before a time or two, and then said, ‘We have lunch every Wednesday. Come.’ I did. Within a few weeks she showed up with sketches on one side of a poster board and printed copies of Come Back and Home Place on the back. She talked me through her process. Background. A masking compound she applied over the background before painting the foreground. How she could alter different things. Art teacher Betsy. I was intrigued.

Within a few more weeks, Betsy’s always precarious health got worse. Before I knew her, she was an active skier and boater, a rider and trainer of quarter horses. That was before Rheumatoid Arthritis did its worse. Terrible back pain. Uncontrollable nausea. And then oy vey, congestive heart failure. ‘Thanks, Dad,’ she said.

Still, she kept going. The pool, lunch, the theater, book club, her art club, church. A lot. Including working on the cover for Look Up! By then, I was entirely sure of the title. But before long, she was able to do less and less. She’d come to lunch but would hardly eat. She’d cough and ache at the theater. She hated it but gave in to using a walker. She spent hours waiting to be seen at the Emergency Room. Several times. And was admitted to the hospital. Several times.

She’d come home exhausted but stubbornly determined to do for herself. Her neighbor and friend Laurie dropped in to check on her daily. Our retired Physician Assistant friend Jody drove her to doctor appointments and deciphered instructions and medications. Terry and other friends brought food that had to be dispersed when Betsy landed in the hospital again. I dropped in to visit occasionally and texted photos when something beautiful brought Betsy to mind. More than once, she lamented, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been able to work on your cover.’

‘Not to worry,’ I said. ‘It’s not done yet anyway.’ I was dawdling, hoping she’d get better. Sometimes she seemed to. Then after three or four good days, she’d have another set-back.

Meanwhile, I slogged through rewrites, inching closer to done. But what about the cover? As she struggled over the summer, I contacted another artist to get on her schedule. Then after a ten-hour Emergency Room wait accompanied by Jody and Terry at the mother lode of hospitals in our area, Betsy came home looking and acting more like herself than she had for months. I picked her up for Book Club in September and saw two unfinished cherry blossom paintings in her office.

‘These look good,’ I said. ‘But I ran into Nancy who did the Home Place cover,’ I fibbed. ‘I asked what her schedule was like, and she’s got time in October. I know you haven’t been able to do as much as you wanted. Maybe you’d like to be out from under that pressure?’

‘Oh no,’ Betsy said. ‘I want to do it.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘It’s yours.’ If that’s what my friend wanted after all she’d been through, it’s what I wanted too. Did I have doubts? Sure. But I put those aside because she was Betsy.

About two weeks later, she went into the hospital for the last time. During my last visit with her there, unable to do anything to ease her discomfort, I held her hand. My grip was gentle. Hers was surprisingly strong. We spoke little, but when we did it was of love. Her last words to me were, “I really love you guys.” She died two days later.

Dear Betsy. There’s so much to make me glad I knew her. I think of her as an inviter and includer. She invited me to try her water aerobics class once when I showed up to swim laps. ‘Come on. It’s more fun,’ she said. It was and I’ve been there ever since. She invited me to join friends she’d known for decades in her lunch and theater groups. At every book club meeting, she lived up to our name – the ‘Really Readers’ because we do really read the book. (We also enjoy conversation over wine and food.) When our talking stick got to Betsy, she often consulted her notes before saying, ‘Lots of names to keep straight…’ She’d conclude her turn by thanking the host who picked the book ‘for making me read it.’ Every single time – even when she hated the book.

Losing a friend like Betsy is hard, a cause to morn. I also mourned the art she’d begun for my cover. I knew it wasn’t finished enough to use, but still. Would her family want it? Would they trash it? I wondered but expected I might never know. I didn’t know Betsy’s family. Nor would I intrude on their loss.

Coming into the church before the funeral, Laurie greeted me with the question other friends had asked. ‘What’s going to happen with your book cover?’ All I could do was shrug and say, Betsy hadn’t finished. ‘But what about the paintings in her office?’ I shrugged again, resigned that I’d likely never see them again.

But at the reception following Betsy’s funeral – where I learned even more about the friend I treasured, I saw Laurie and Betsy’s niece chatting and joined them, thinking I’d express condolences. I’d never have asked about the painting, but Laurie did. The nieces’s response was immediate. ‘Come get it. I’ll be at her house next week.’ Arrangements were made. She’d text Laurie who’d walk over and collect the painting for me. Gosh.

Betsy had done two paintings, one more finished than the other. I expected someone in her family would want the more finished one. I’d be thrilled to have the other. I knew I couldn’t use it for the cover, but I wanted it because it was Betsy’s art. But Betsy’s sister gave Laurie both!

A couple weeks later, Laurie called again. Betsy’s niece had found two more paintings. ‘They’re small,’ Laurie said. ‘But they’re really nice. You need to have them.’ I drove right over and gasped when Laurie handed them over.

Book-sized. As if Betsy saw them as the front and back cover. ‘I never saw these before,’ I said. ‘I wonder when she did them?’ Was it before she got so sick? One of those times she rallied? Before or after she reiterated that she really did want to do the cover? ‘Oh. Look!” I showed Laurie what she’d already seen. ‘She penciled in the title and my name.’ Oh, Betsy.

Could I use Betsy’s art for my cover. Sadly, no. Nor, I believe, would she want me to. See the yellow in the sky? She added the yellow against her better judgment trying to meet my request to ‘brand’ my books. Blue was the color that had her changing directions – the blue in one of the first photos taken by the James Webb telescope. The first time I saw it, I was mesmerized. For the first time, I wished I were a science fiction writer because those pictures of star nurseries were begging to be the cover of a book. Not so much a relationship fiction genre book like mine. But science fiction? Oh yes. Such a blue!

I rhapsodized about the blue to Betsy at lunch one day, and pulled out my phone to show her. “That’s what you want?’ she asked.

‘Oh no. You’ve already done so much work. I just love that blue.’

‘I never did like that yellow sky,’ Betsy said. ‘I really don’t like the way it looks.’

Huh. She didn’t like the sunset feel to what she’d painted but put it in anyway because it’s what I asked for. And now, though I didn’t ask her to change directions and duplicate that amazing blue, my friend Betsy was ready to abandon everything she’d already done and start anew. Gosh.

Her RA meant that Betsy was nearly always in pain and often ill. But it took a lot before she’d give in to it. So, was she hurting at the time she set out to give me that blue? Probably. Did she sense time winding down? I don’t know. I do know she was excited about sketching in the suggestion of the Jefferson Memorial and a peachy hue to water in the Tidal Basin. Did I like the peach? ‘Great color,’ I said. ‘But wouldn’t the water reflect the sky?’ Once again, she compromised her artistic eye for what I wanted and added more blue.

‘I’ll work on the blossoms next, and mask out the brown behind them,’ she planned. Alas, she never had the energy to finish what she wanted to do.

‘Can you use Betsy’s art for your cover anyway?’ friends asked.

‘I don’t think it was done enough, and,’ I said before her funeral, ‘I don’t have it.’ And then, bless her family and dear Laurie, I got it all. But no. None of the paintings were ready to be be a book cover. I suppose I could learn how to add title and text to the book-sized paintings, but I doubt I’d do it well. And there’s that yellow sky. She’d not be satisfied, nor would I, with her unfinished work either. So, no. I’m sad to say that Look Up will have to go out in the world uncovered by the art of my friend Betsy Cox.

Does not being able to use her work diminish my joy at having Betsy’s art for my own? Not in the least! Every glance at it on my walls or in my phone will feel like sitting across the table from my friend, like talking books, art, and theater, like seeing her smile and leaning in to soak in her quiet wisdom. Like being lucky enough to call this smart, talented, generous woman as my treasured friend.

I love you Betsy. May you dance among the stars in a sky of whatever color strikes your fancy. I know it won’t be yellow.

Read more about Betsy Cox and the many friends who shared tributes here. She touched so many.