Today I find myself looking into the colors of The Talisman not because they explain anything, but because they refuse to. In this season of grief, explanation feels dishonest. It feels too clean, too linear for an experience that has arrived sideways. What I am living inside now is not confusion so much as suspension: the moment after structure has collapsed and before anything new has cohered. Paul Sérusier’s painting gives that condition a visual language.
A month after my grandmother’s death, the reality of it finally settled in. Until then, I was protected by work. The estate needed managing. There were documents, phone calls, lists, errands. There were tasks that demanded attention and offered immediate justification for my presence in the world. Action functioned as scaffolding. I mistook productivity for preparedness and told myself I had done the emotional work in advance. What I failed to anticipate was not the pain of loss, but the silence that would follow the end of being needed.
This delay now seems psychologically precise. Grief did not wait because it was weak; it waited because responsibility held it at bay. Caregiving and estate work provided structure, urgency, and moral clarity. There was always something that had to be done, someone who depended on me. Only when that necessity disappeared did grief announce itself. Doing so not with drama, but with a flat, almost bureaucratic certainty: this is real, and it is finished.
When the work stopped, the quiet arrived all at once. No one needed me to go to the store. No one needed me to stop by. No one needed me to check in and make sure they were okay. The thought that surfaced—no one needs me anymore—was not a conclusion I reasoned my way toward. It simply appeared, fully formed, the way grief so often speaks in absolutes. It was less a belief than a sensation, heavy and unarguable.
This is where The Talisman began to feel less like a painting and more like a mirror. In it, the familiar grammar of landscape dissolves. The river does not behave like water; it becomes a broad, unnatural field of yellow. The trees do not anchor space or establish depth; they flatten into bands of color that resist hierarchy. Perspective collapses. Foreground and background lose their meaning. What remains is sensation without orientation.
This is the logic of Synthetism: not the depiction of appearances, but the synthesis of outward form, inner experience, and formal structure. Nature is not copied; it is reorganized. Color no longer describes; it asserts. The painting does not ask to be verified against reality but to be entered as an experience in its own right. It is not a window onto the world but a surface upon which consciousness leaves a trace.
Psychologically, this is exactly how grief feels once obligation disappears. The sharp edges of life, the roles, routines, and responsibilities all soften and blur. Time flattens. Days lose their punctuation. Meaning no longer announces itself through necessity. What remains is intensity without instruction. Feeling without narrative. Presence without orientation. The self does not vanish, but it loses its familiar outline.
What I am coming to understand is that I was not only grieving my grandmother; I was grieving the version of myself that existed in relation to her. Caregiving had given my identity a stable geometry. It organized my days and, more importantly, my sense of worth. I mattered because someone tangibly depended on me. Even the “10,000 annoyances” I used to complain about—the errands, the interruptions, the daily obligations—were confirmations of that bond. They were the texture of love enacted over time.
When that structure disappeared, it left behind more than sadness. It left behind disorientation. The loss was not only relational but existential. I had prepared myself for her death, but I had not prepared myself for the collapse of purpose that followed. The question that surfaced—who am I now?—was not aspirational or forward-looking. It was destabilizing. It echoed a line from the movie, I Heart Huckabees that has stayed with me: Who am I if I’m not me?
That question feels unanswerable because it exposes something unsettling: that the “me” I thought of as stable was, in fact, contextual. It was produced through role, repetition, and necessity. When those conditions vanished, the self did not disappear, but it became unfamiliar to itself. Identity flattened into something closer to raw experience than narrative continuity.
Synthetism does not offer comfort here, and that is precisely why it feels honest. The Talisman does not reconstruct the world into a new, legible order. It does not replace lost structure with reassuring symbolism or sentiment. Instead, it insists that experience stripped of explanation is still valid. Color stands in for certainty. Sensation precedes meaning. The painting does not resolve disorientation; it legitimizes it.
Philosophically, this matters. The work suggests that meaning is not discovered fully formed, but constructed provisionally from within uncertainty. It resists teleology. There is no implied arc toward resolution, no promise that clarity will arrive if one simply endures long enough. What it offers instead is fidelity. A fidelity to perception as it is lived, not as it is supposed to be organized. In this sense, The Talisman affirms a constructivist understanding of meaning: reality is not passively received but actively synthesized, or constructed, by consciousness.
Seen this way, the painting reframes grief itself. What I am living through is not emptiness, but an interval. It is a liminal space in which old structures have fallen away and new ones have not yet emerged. Like Sérusier’s landscape, my life has flattened into a field of sensation. That flattening feels frightening because it offers no instructions, no obvious next step. But it is also truthful. To rush toward clarity now would be to impose perspective where none yet exists.
If The Talisman is a talisman at all, it is not because it protects against loss, but because it sanctifies this in-between state. It gives permission to exist without definition, to inhabit silence without immediately filling it, to allow identity to loosen without mistaking that looseness for disappearance. It affirms that not knowing who I am yet is not failure. It is honesty.
For now, meaning does not need to be rebuilt. It needs to be allowed to reassemble at its own pace. Like color finding its relationship to color, like form emerging slowly from flatness, identity will return. It will return not as obligation, but as choice. Until then, I sit with the color. I sit with the quiet. I sit with the question, Who am I if I'm not me? And I allow the self that no longer knows its outline to exist without apology.