LUCIEN SMITH BOOK MEMORIAL

I miss my boy…

For the last seventeen years, I tried to respect his space as an adult. Now I wish I had tried harder. That may be one of grief’s cruelest lessons: you always think you have time. Time for anger to pass. Time for people to change. Time to make the telephone call. Time to forgive. Time to ask for forgiveness. Time for a father and son to find their way back to one another. Until there isn’t. I didn’t know how troubled my son had become. No one told me. From a distance, I believed I was doing what a father sometimes must do when his child becomes a man: allowing him to live his own life.

Now he is gone.

And something unexpected has begun happening. People are posting photographs of Lucien on Instagram. They are telling their respective stories. They are sharing moments with him that I never knew existed. And through those photographs and memories, an old father is being introduced to the man his little boy became. There is enormous sadness in that. But there is also a gift. You are all showing me seventeen years of my son’s life that I missed. Please keep posting. Please keep telling me your stories. Tell me about the ridiculous things he did. Tell me what made him laugh. Tell me what pissed him off. Tell me about the paintings. The parties. The arguments. The tenderness. The contradictions. Tell me about the Lucien you knew. Don’t make him perfect.

Make him Lucien.

I am going to make a book about my son. I would be honored to include your photographs, memories, letters, drawings, stories and the fragments of Lucien that remain with you. Because I am beginning to understand something I could not see from the distance between us: My son had a beautiful, rewarding and complicated life. He touched many people I have never met. He mattered to people whose names I do not know. He loved and he was loved.

Before the artist, before the success, before the distance, before whatever pain he carried that I could not see, there was a little boy sitting beside his father in a Baton Rouge taxi who watched a woman hand his dad $300 for a painting and suddenly understood that making art could be a life. I was there for that moment. And I will carry it for whatever time I have left.

I miss you, Lu. I wish we had more time. I wish I had tried harder. But most of all, I am proud that you were my son.

And now I want to know the rest of your story.

Please help me tell it.

Terrence Sanders-Smith

LUCIEN SMITH BOOK MEMORIAL SUBMISSIONS: PLEASE SUBMIT SENTIMENTS, STORIES and IMAGES TO ARTVOICESBOOKS@GMAIL.COM.