On Mugs, Cancer and Transforming Our Bruises

My husband and I used to have a housemate named Vanessa in a big, stately old brownstone in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. This was in the 1990s, when the neighborhood was kind of like the O.K. Corral and every day, there were fresh bizarre car accidents to puzzle over. (“But how did the car end up upside-down without anyone in it???”) We lived on the top floor, our landlord lived on the main floor and Vanessa and her occasional boyfriend, a tall, glowering guy who was as grumpy as she was buoyant, lived in the basement.

Vanessa was a true ray of sunshine. In retrospect, I think her secret was she was usually just a little high, but she was also just naturally bubbly. I would see her sometimes coming home from work and she’d truly be skipping down the street, chatting with the birds, smiling at strangers. She was just a lovely person, kind of a hippie but more than anything, an artist. She loved the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt and would paint lavish, lush works inspired by him with the curvy lines and bright colors of the psychedelic ’60s. Like any good Deadhead, Vanessa had an old Volkswagen van, but hers was covered with dreamy visions she painted on by hand. One warm day, I was outside while she was painting on her car. “Every time I get a new dent or scratch,” she said, “I paint a flower on it.” It’s true, her van was covered with flowers. “Like a kiss on…