What do you see when you close your eyes?
Tattoo, drawing (marker on printer paper) at Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale New Haven, CT and Atelier Eva, Brooklyn, NY
Gili Rappaport with Cassie Rappaport and Eva Karabudak
November 2020 — February 2021
My mom, Cassie Rappaport, was diagnosed with terminal stage cancer in 2019, and underwent a series of treatments and clinical trials in the quest to recover. During one particularly long hospital stay, she asked me to guide her in a meditation exercise. I began to share a prompt for visualization: what do you see when you close your eyes? When we were finished, she grabbed a piece of printer paper and drew this drawing. She told me that it was her ancestors sending love down into her heart, which was enveloping our family, and sending healing energy into her lung and her liver. After she died, I had the drawing tattooed on my left arm.