Buried Light
An essay by Chad Schomber
Buried Light
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The thing about giving something up is, no one ever claps for it. There’s no parade for a dream walked away from. No one frames the empty canvas.
My dad was a fine arts major. The real kind. Knew his way around a kneaded eraser and could talk composition like it mattered more than politics. He was special at it. Not in a sentimental, everyone-has-a-gift way. I mean he was good. That kind of good. The kind that makes other people stop what they’re doing and watch.
But he set it down.
He didn’t lose it. He just put it down one day and walked toward something else. Steady paycheck. Health insurance. A little backyard. Kids who grew like mold in the corners of his time.
He never called it sacrifice. I only saw that word on his face once, and even then, it looked more like a wince. He used different language. “Things change.” “Life gets busy.” “I just didn’t have the time.” Simple. Dry. Unheroic.
Sacrifice, real sacrifice, doesn’t glow. It doesn’t even always hurt. Sometimes it just dulls. Slowly. Like light under dirt.
But buried light still burns. That’s what I didn’t understand until years later.
When I was eight, we were going to State for hockey. He asked me to get him headshots of my teammates. Just photos. Nothing fancy. He had a few weeks, he said. Needed something to keep his hands busy.
Over that time, he sketched every one of them. Charcoal and pastel. You could smell the dust in the "art room". The paper sat stacked in neat piles on the table we weren’t supposed to lean on. He brought the finished drawings to the hotel. Parents flipped through them in the hallway outside our rooms. There were a few ooohs, a couple of quiet “wow”s. Some asked to keep theirs. The kids shrugged. But the parents stared.
Those sketches were good. Not just technically, but true. He caught something in their eyes. The way one kid held his jaw too tight. The way another leaned a little too far forward, like he was always bracing for a hit. He saw the thing under the thing. That’s what he was good at.
That’s when I realized he’d never really quit art. He’d just stopped chasing it as a nameplate.
His talent didn’t vanish. It just re-rooted. Quietly. Under the floorboards. Under the leftovers for lunch, walking to work, endless home repairing rhythm of the years.
We talk about talent like it’s a thing to protect. To showcase. But he treated it like seed. He buried it in us.
Sacrifice isn’t noble when you’re in it. It’s tiring. Boring. A series of unthanked choices. Choosing to work overtime instead of paint. Choosing to show up instead of show off. Choosing family over fire—and not always with joy, either. Just with patience.
Patience kills most things. That's what I think he believes, deep down. It wears them out. Softens sharp edges. He didn’t chase recognition because he knew it doesn’t stay. He didn’t mourn what he gave up because he didn’t see it as gone. Just changed.
There’s a common mistake people make when they talk about giving up dreams for a family. They treat it like a tragedy. A funeral in slow motion. But it’s not that. Not for everyone. Sometimes it’s a decision so quiet you forget it happened. You just look up twenty years later and realize what you’ve built with the pieces you used to think were meant for something else.
My dad didn’t stop being an artist. He just stopped being seen as one. Big difference.
He could still tell you why a line works better broken than straight. He could still explain how negative space breathes. He could still get a sketch down in under ten minutes that felt like a mirror. But he never talked about it. He wasn’t haunted. Just busy.
That’s the part that feels tragic from the outside. To see someone with so much quiet brilliance and think, what a waste.But inside—if you ask him—it’s different. He got to use his gift. Just not in the way you’d expect. Not in galleries. In small ways. Real ways.
My science project volcano in third grade, built from a paper towel tube, insulation foam, and candle wax—his idea, his hands, my name on the ribbon. Ask my Uncle about his old driveway fence.
He never chased applause. He chased stability. And found beauty by accident along the way.
Most people think of sacrifice as subtraction. I think of it now as transmutation. The slow, invisible shift of something rare into something useful.
He made his life the frame. The art got folded into the corners. Into moments. Into us.
Those sketches of my teammates are just memories now. Maybe one or two exist. Somewhere. How you keep something sacred without turning it into a shrine?
You use it. Even if it’s not in the way you thought.
My dad used to say the hardest part of art is knowing when you’re finished. That’s true. But maybe the harder part is knowing when it’s not. When it’s still happening. Just slower. Just somewhere else.
He’s not finished. And neither is the art. I hope.