Gold, an artist whose paintings sell for as much as 85,000, was in her early 30s when doctors, responding to her complaints of fainting and temper tantrums, discovered what appeared to be a lesion on her brain stem. Because of its location, it was inaccessible by surgery and could have just one inevitable conclusion—death.
Undaunted, Gold, who lived in Washington, began to research her condition at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. She discovered that Dr. Raymond Kjellberg, a neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, was treating brain-stem abnormalities with Harvard's giant cyclotron—a World War II-era machine designed to study particle physics—using it to aim energy beams with pinpoint accuracy at tumors and lesions. On March 3, 1987, Kjellberg blasted Gold's pea-size growth with a massive 2,000 rads of radiation. While the treatment itself took a half hour, it was two years before doctors were certain it had worked. "Thai's what started me thinking in terms of appreciating life," says Gold. "It forced me to really think."
The uncertainty of those years—and the ever-present possibility of death—had a profound effect on Gold's life and painting. She moved back in with her mother in Groton, the coastal Connecticut town where she had grown up one of three children of a banker and an elementary school teacher who divorced when she was 3. And she began painting with new insight. Webster Terhune, art curator at the library in nearby Westerly, was startled by the change. The work completed after 1986 "looks as if it were done by another person," he says. "There is this intense affection for objects that one wouldn't spend a lot of lime looking at. I said, 'What happened here?' "
What happened, of course, was Cold's illness. " 'In many ways," she says, "it made me much stronger as an artist, much stronger as a person."
Terhune invited Cold to create a mural for his library, and she accepted—but attached the unusual proviso that she would, after a month, destroy what she had created. The citizens of Westerly, moved by Gold's story, soon got caught up in the project. A local pizzeria provided lunches, and a construction company donated the scaffolding Cold needed. The library paid her no fee but donated the $1,100 worth of pastels consumed by the work.
Gold plans to invite a few close friends to view the erasing. "I can't wait until Jan. 1," she says. "To me it seems like the most natural thing to do. I don't see it as a sad thing."
MICHAEL NEILL
THOMAS DUFFY in Westerly
- Contributors:
- Thomas Duffy.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
