Escape to Portugal

No matter where you go, there you are.

Two Houses. Two Painters. Two Parents. is a newsletter of stories about art, feminism, grief, and time excavated from the Soho loft where I grew up. Posts are free and illustrated with the work of my long-divorced parents, the painters Mimi Weisbord and Lennart Anderson. Sign up here:

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Kim and I are back from Portugal. We didn’t want to be in the US for the inauguration, so we planned this trip long ago, aware there was a chance we’d miss standing on American soil with its first woman president.

Instead, on inauguration day, we were greeted with compassion by Brits on a hillside above Leiria. They’d escaped the Brexit era to renovate villas and now have an Airbnb with a tremendous view.

It was the rainy season, and we were treated to a bright Disney rainbow when the sun broke through, incongruous with the day but welcome. There, I posted Missing LaToya, a grief piece to align with the zeitgeist.

On that hilltop, I had a rare dream about my mother, just as I did last spring when we were in Prague. This was another dream soaked in her brutal decline, but this time about not being physically with her when she died. She left us in the eye of the pandemic on Long Island. Her children and grandchildren sang to her in her memory care residence over FaceTime.

My mother carried her child self just below the surface, below what was blood and muscle for most of her life, but by 2020, her surface was sallow and translucent, the embryo of a bird hatched too soon.

“I’ve just been born, and now I’m supposed to die,” she leveled at me over the phone just days before she passed.

In Lisbon, we caught a fiery sunset from a friend’s apartment, setting off the Tagus River and silhouetting its famous bridge. I had not yet seen that view when I dreamt of my mother, but now they are conflated, the dream and that orange and gold sky setting to a midnight blue.

My mother did not spend time in Lisbon, but she sketched and painted during a beach vacation in Portugal. I know because I’ve found bits of those efforts, her way of enjoying where she was. Sunny watercolors. The life of a tourist.

Mimi Weisbord. Dona Ana beach - Algarve, Portugal. c. 2003. Watercolor on paper. 5 x 7 in. ©2025 Estate of Mimi Weisbord

Also around Lisbon, Kim and I spied tiles painted with ships with billowing blue sails identical to one we’d salvaged from the loft. And I spotted a gauzy patterned scarf hanging in shops like one I have from a drawer in her studio. I also ate my second-ever grilled bream, the fish my parents once enjoyed in Greece.

I delighted in finding her this way, unaware of how those signs of her would work in my subconscious.

And conscience.

In my dream, she is made of sinews and bone, tangled in sheets, head tipped back with oxygen tubing at her nose. Someone says she is gone.

But I gather her up, a soft bundle of branches, and together, we sit gazing through wide windows at the last colors of the day and the first colors of this dream. She leaves the world grateful for my holding her.

It sounds like catharsis, and it was, but I woke up shocked and choking.

I can’t fix the way she died.

An unspoken rule of my parents’ divorce and my time divided was that my loyalty be evenly split. The scales must not tip in one direction, or everything might fall apart. My parents are gone, and the rule still governs.

I was with my father when he died. I gave him morphine. I kept him warm in his hospital bed in the early morning hours in Brooklyn. I know that you never know how someone will die, but in my person is this fucked up feeling that she didn’t get what I gave to him.

His life was that billowing sailship. Her lungs filled with fluid. She drowned at sea.

I could not prevent her suffering.

The irony of this rule of their divorce is that they each thought they were at some disadvantage with me. Growing up, there were times I exhausted myself defending them to each other. I wanted them to get along. I wanted their permission to love them equally.

In the loft, I found dream journals my mother had kept over decades. She began recording dreams as a task for psychoanalysis; it became a compulsion. She wrote dreams down everywhere.

I found them in little phone books, notepads, formal bound journals, sketchbooks, and on torn bits of envelopes. They drifted about, an incoherent record of tangled relationships.

In the kitchen, they fell from the cookbooks I’d reach for on high shelves like pressed leaves.

She had marked where to return to—recipes to make with dreams she couldn’t shake.

The tile from the loft.

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