I keep returning to Piotr Naliwajko’s Piłat, drawn less to the suffering Christ than to the seated figure who refuses to look at him. Pilate sits with his back half-turned, the sharp weight of the beam looming behind him like a truth he cannot bear to face. The cigarette in his hand feels strangely contemporary, almost mundane, as if he seeks refuge in the ritual of smoke. In his posture I recognize a modern man caught in the undertow of an event too large for him, a moment where certainty collapses and interior fracture becomes visible.
These past weeks with my grandmother’s dying have placed me in a similar position. It placed me close to suffering, intimately aware that something irreversible is unfolding, yet unable to fully absorb its meaning. My brother and I held her hands as she took her final breath. I saw the moment she left the world. I was not absent or turned away. And yet, now that she is gone, I find myself unable to anchor that knowledge in my daily life. There exists a part of me that has stored the truth of her death, and another part that continues to move as though she is still here, waiting for the next call, the next errand, the next familiar request.
This split is not irrational. It is the shape grief takes. Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance describes the tension created by holding incompatible beliefs, but grief introduces a special kind of dissonance. It articulates one in which the mind and the body hold different versions of reality. My mind knows my grandmother is dead. My body still reaches for my phone expecting her name to appear. My hand turns the car automatically toward her street, following the grooves carved by years of care and routine. In these moments, I am startled by the stubbornness of my own habits, how they carry me forward even when my rational understanding has withdrawn its consent.
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio writes about the “somatic markers” that guide our actions long before conscious thought intervenes. Merleau-Ponty would call it the habit-body, the part of us that moves through the world according to patterns learned over time. My habit-body remains loyal to the life I lived with my grandmother. It does not yet know how to inhabit this new terrain of absence. And so it carries me, on its own quiet autopilot—my own “auto-Pilate”—through gestures that once had meaning and now lead only to the hollow space where she used to be.
This automatic movement is not denial. It is devotion. It is the inertia of love.
When I look again at Pilate in Naliwajko’s painting, I see not cowardice but recognition. He is a man whose body turns away because he lacks the capacity to take in what stands before him. His refusal is an act of overwhelm, not malice. His cigarette, held loosely between his fingers, becomes a ritual of grounding, a fragile tether to ordinary life in the midst of the unbearable. I understand that gesture now. I live it.
But something else has begun to shift in me, something that moves beyond dissonance toward meaning-making. I discovered this the other evening as I sat on my own porch, pipe in hand, the air cooling as dusk settled across the yard. My wind chimes were moving in the gentle breeze, their melody drifting through the wind. I realized, with a kind of soft shock, that I had heard this sound before. I had heard it not here, but in the background of my grandmother’s phone calls. She often sat on her porch when she spoke to me, and the chimes would ring faintly behind her voice, a familiar accompaniment to our conversations.
Now, listening to my own chimes, I found myself inhabiting both the painting and my grandmother’s presence. I sat as Pilate sits. I sat turned slightly away from the unbearable weight behind me, pipe smoke curling upward like a private ritual, yet I also felt myself sitting in my grandmother’s place, listening to the chimes as she once did. In that moment, the boundaries between us grew thin. The painting, my grief, and my memories converged in a single sensory field. I was no longer only the witness to suffering or the one who turns away. I was also the inheritor of her quiet rituals, the one who sits on the porch and listens for the world to speak.
This is not resolution. It is not acceptance in any final sense. It is something more subtle: a willingness to remain in the liminal space, to allow grief to become embodied rather than resisted. It is the moment where the body, still confused by loss, begins to learn a new choreography. A choreography not of forgetting, not replacing, but reshaping the world around the absence. As the chimes sounded, I felt the first faint sense that I could carry her forward not only in memory, but in the rhythms of my own life.
In this way, I turn. I turn not away from suffering as Pilate does, and not fully toward acceptance either, but toward meaning. I turn toward a mode of presence that honors the habits that remain, the echoes that linger, and the love that continues to move through me like a quiet melody played one chime at a time. And in that turning, I discover that grief is not merely a fracture, a dissonant cord. It is also a bridge, carrying me from what was to what will be.