6 months ago
WASHINGTON, DC (WUSA) -- Regina Holliday wanted to be on her ladder early Monday, painting, in the sweltering heat, a tribute to her dead husband.
But the babysitter forgot that Regina's two little boys, ages 3 and 10 would need her attention, and Holliday had to delay her daily efforts to paint a 20-foot-high mural depicting her husband's death in June from kidney cancer.
Fred Holliday was only 39-years-old. Without health insurance, he didn't have the resources to pay for the diagnostic tests necessary to discover the cause of his worsening condition. When he found a job that did offer those health benefits, doctors diagnosed the cancer and found it was too late to save him from it.
The mural is a way of highlighting the trauma faced by those who don't have access to health care, and it is Regina's way of honoring the man who fathered those two boys.
It depicts Fred on his deathbed amidst a health care system unable to save him, and it is being painted on the wall of a gas station, which faces a drug store near the intersection of Nebraska and Connecticut Avenues in Northwest Washington.
"His passing was in vain. This this horrible, horrible thing had to happen to us. We had such a stressful time, our entire hospitalization experience. We couldn't do anything to save him, but if we stepped forward, we could save other people, and we could make a difference with his life," Holliday told a woman who asked what she was trying to accomplish.
"Cause it truly is a battle for health reform, and do you stand quietly and let people suffer, and let them die, or do you stand up, regardless of consequence and fight and try to change things? I mean our forebearers did it. That's what made our nation. They couldn't stand to see the injustice any longer," she told 9NEWS NOW.
The mural is painted as if the characters are on a stage, with curtains above and on the side.
"It's supposed to symbolize where we stand on the national stage, what's our story within a national healthcare crisis. And so, the stage curtains open! The set is dark. There is not a lot of light," she explains.
In the mural, her husband is in a hospital bed surrounded by medical workers, and Regina looking on. She paints herself with three faces.
"The concept there is I am a wife, and my face is facing my husband, and it's wearing one of those plastic halloween masks, to look pretty. Because you know, you want to look pretty for your spouse. You wanna look happy and pretty and supportive. And behind that mask is whatever my real face looks like. And then, as you look the other direction, you'll see the caregiver's face. That face is distraught and beseeching, and asking desperately for the nurse to give me the information I need, to provide care to my husband."
The painting depicts medical workers bound by rope, hands tied by medical bureaucracy and waste.
She wants viewers to think: "The current medical model is not based on patient- centered care. If we put patients, and what patients need at the very center of this argument, then, it will change the argument. Because right now, it's about money. That's not what it should be about. It should be about how are we treating people."
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