When I first looked at Zhiyong Jing’s My Sunshine Sleeps in Your Darkness, I felt an immediate recognition. The burning figure at the center did not feel abstract or symbolic, it felt autobiographical. The flames rose not as metaphor but as memory: the shape of my own anger standing upright against a vast, indifferent night. In the distance, a faint silhouette walks away, dissolving into the darkness. That distant figure is every member of my family who died before I could say goodbye. It is Ernie, it is Chuck, it is Diedra. Each leaving the frame before I arrived, each stepping into that unreachable horizon where words can no longer find them.
The painting becomes a portrait of emotional geometry: immolation in the foreground, disappearance in the back. The burning body is the fire that once consumed me. The departing figure is the summation of my losses. And the darkness is everything I could not face.
Psychologists Leslie Greenberg and Antonio Pascual-Leone argue that anger is often “a secondary reactive emotion, covering up more vulnerable primary emotions." Standing before this painting, I recognize the truth of that theory with uncomfortable clarity. The burning form is the reaction, but the vulnerable emotions, the grief and longing and fear, stand quietly in the distance, half-hidden.
When my grandfather Ernie died before I could say goodbye, I believed the heat in my chest was anger. When my grandfather Chuck collapsed alone in his hallway, leaving his unresolved relationship with me frozen in place, I thought my fury was self-evident. And when my grandmother Diedra excluded us from her final days, when she told me she was excited to become a grandmother, as if I never counted, the fire inside me felt righteous and justified.
But none of that was the root. C. S. Lewis once wrote, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” I would add: No one told me grief felt so like anger. Anger offered a sense of power, of heat, of forward movement, at the very moment I was most powerless. It was easier to burn than to break.
The art historian John Berger observed, “We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things." The relation here is stark: the burning figure demands attention, but the true story is the figure fading into the dark. Anger illuminated my pain but also hid its origin. It was a bright, consuming flare that distracted me from the truth that I was grieving all the things I lost: goodbyes, reconciliations, belonging.
Martha Nussbaum describes anger as a response to a perceived injury, coupled with a desire for payback. But in grief, payback has nowhere to land. The dead cannot be confronted. There is no apology to demand, no resolution to seek, no conflict to settle. The fire burns because it has nowhere else to go. It becomes an immolation, a blaze consuming the body that bears it.
And yet, here with Grandma Maxine, something is different. Her dying has not come suddenly. She has not shut us out. There is no abrupt disappearance, no locked emotional door. Her decline unfolds slowly, tenderly, and she allows us to walk with her. She lets us witness her final days in the open light of family presence.
This vigil, this long, quiet companionship, has revealed something profound: the fire inside me has changed.
As I sit beside her, adjusting blankets, brushing her hair back gently, holding her hand as she sleeps, I feel the grief rising but it is no longer the scorching fire of anger. It does not consume. It does not blind. It does not demand. Instead, it feels like a hearth: warm, contained, shared.
This grief draws us in rather than driving us apart. It warms rather than burns. It offers strength rather than destruction. Around this hearth, my family gathers. We share stories, memories, small moments of humor, the ache of what is coming, and the gratitude for what remains. We take turns caring for her and of each other, each act of tenderness becoming another piece of kindling placed with intention and love.
Carl Rogers wrote, “What is most personal is most universal.” Watching Maxine’s final journey, I feel the universality of grief. I feel its capacity to soften us when we stop resisting it. For the first time, I can name my grief directly. I do not need anger to shield me.
Here, in the dim light of her room, grief has become a companion rather than an adversary. It has become a teacher. In caring for her, I am finally able to confront the grief I carried for years. I can look past the fire and into the darkness without flinching. I can see the shapes of the people I’ve lost without collapsing into the old flames.
And in that clarity, forgiveness rises naturally, without force, without strain.
I forgive the dead for leaving.
I forgive myself for surviving.
I forgive the versions of my relationships that ended unfinished.
The painting ends in darkness, but my vigil does not. The fire that once consumed me has become a hearth. Its warmth steadies me, steadies us, and allows us to say what was never said.
And that, perhaps, is the quiet grace of this moment:
I can finally lay the fire down.
I can finally say goodbye.
I can finally forgive.