The Weight of a Life
There is something deeply human about our need to imagine what happens after death.
There is something deeply human about our need to imagine what happens after death.
Perhaps because we find it impossible to accept that everything we have been, everything we have loved, learned, and built, could simply disappear.
Lately, death has been more present in my life. I have experienced it closely under very different circumstances, in a life cut short far too soon and in another that had spanned more than nine decades.
And it is difficult not to wonder what it truly means to have lived.
Two very different ways of reaching the same place, two stories impossible to compare, and one shared question about the value of the time we have.
Death has a way of reminding us that, no matter how much we try to bring order to our lives, there will always be something beyond our control.
And that is why I have turned my attention to one of the stories that fascinates me most in Egyptian mythology.
According to this tradition, when a person died, their heart was weighed on a scale against the feather of Maat, a symbol of truth and justice. Anubis watched over that moment, when an entire existence seemed to be held in the balance between two small objects.
It was not wealth, power, or material achievements that determined the fate of the deceased, but the symbolic weight of their existence.
I have always found this way of representing something as complex as a human life through such a simple gesture fascinating.
In this painting, I wanted to bring that moment into a space that does not entirely belong to any particular place. A woman seems to be slowly dissolving, as though her body had begun to lose the boundaries that hold it together.
Anubis remains by her side.
A scale awaits, and a door remains open to the imagination.
I did not want to portray death as a punishment or as a promise of salvation. I am more interested in it as a boundary that forces us to look at life from a different perspective.
I do not believe a life can be judged simply by dividing it into successes and mistakes.
We are far too complex for that.
That is why, in my interpretation, the scale is not so much about determining who deserves to cross the threshold, but rather about raising a question for those of us who are still on this side.
What weight do our decisions carry?
How much room do we make for the things we truly love?
To what extent are we living a life we recognise as our own?
I like to think that balance is not about having been perfect, but about having tried to live with a certain honesty, accepting our contradictions and finding value in what we do.
This painting is not so much about the judgement that awaits us after death, but about how we choose to live before that moment comes.
I like to think that true balance does not mean going through life without making mistakes. It means having been able to love, to create, to devote ourselves to what moves us. To recognise beauty even in the midst of our own uncertainty.
Because death, beyond the pain it brings to those left behind, also confronts us with a truth we so often forget.
None of this belongs to us forever.
Not the people, not the places, not even the identity we believe we have built.
And perhaps that is precisely where part of life's extraordinary beauty lies. In its fragility, in its unrepeatable nature, and in the possibility of feeling everything while knowing that nothing will remain exactly as we know it.
