They Told Me How Good It Was to Be Alive

"Symbolic portrait of Vincent van Gogh with a skeletal face, rendered in baroque oil painting style. The piece reflects on the intersection of creativity, suffering, and impermanence — a visual homage to the artist’s tortured brilliance and the memento mori tradition. Titled 'Loving Vincent,' it evokes death not as silence, but as a continuation of voice through art."

“The little wheat field with the pale green and the rows of green peas, the sandy road, the blue sky — they spoke to me, they told me how good it was to be alive.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letter 650 to Theo, July 1888

We think death speaks in silence —
but sometimes, the final words arrive in color.

Not in sermons.
Not in obituaries.
But in the soft green of a field that hasn’t yet been harvested.
In the unpaved road winding nowhere in particular.
In the sky that, for no good reason, decides to be blue one more day.

Vincent van Gogh wrote these words not as a man in peace,
but as a soul unraveling —
one brushstroke away from collapse.
And yet even he, whose nights bled into canvas and madness,
paused before a small scene of nothing special
and whispered:
It’s good to be alive.

What Does It Mean?

This quote isn’t about optimism.
It’s not naive hope or religious comfort.

It’s about presence —
the strange peace that sometimes shows up at the edge of grief.

Van Gogh doesn’t say, “I felt good.”
He says, “They told me…”
As if the world itself — not his mind — reminded him:

Life was real.
Life was here.
And even now, life is speaking.

This is the wisdom of the dying.
The truth whispered in hospice rooms, in the last hour of light.
Not everything can be explained.
But some things… can still be felt.

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