Charis Wilson's War

In November of 2009, I read the New York Times obituary for Charis Wilson, who died at the age of 95.

Born on May 5, 1914, Wilson led a life entwined with the charmed and the disenchanted.  Though she got little affection from her divorced parents when she was young, she benefited culturally from being raised by her grandmother and great-aunt, writers connected to the literary community in San Francisco (which included Jack London).

Wilson gained some celebrity and a role in artistic posterity as both model and wife of photographer Edward Weston.  She was merely a teenager when she met Weston, who was in his late 40s at the time.  But, she soon began posing for his photographs and started living with him the following year.

They were together for nearly a dozen years and married for roughly half that time.  It was a great chapter in their lives, as she served as his muse, and his successes included being the first photographer awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

However, the day after she divorced Weston in 1946, she married a labor activist.  That second marriage also ended in divorce in 1967, which is the same year her daughter from that marriage died (a possible murder victim).

Charis Wilson climbed high to the mountain peaks of life and stumbled low into many valleys.  I guess that is the type of roller-coaster existence some are meant to live:  happiness, love, and success are at war with insecurity, dissolution, and tragedy.

Some romanticize the give-and-take of halcyon days and turbulent times, but I wonder if peace is not the more appealing option.  Perhaps the gravitas of our decisions is only revealed in retrospect.