Moving Right Along

Etsy Again

For those fans of Sara's jewelry, I have found her inventory of completed jewelry and I plan to re-open her Etsy store around June 6, 2009 to allow her fans to purchase her last remaining pieces.

Of all my options, I can't think of a more fair way to distribute her work than this. 

- Erik

Relics

I finally started to take seriously the task of deconstructing my True Love's art hovel.  The den of literature and art potential in which she spent most of her days until she was too sick to stay out of bed.   It's hard taking these things apart, it makes you age, it makes your skin recede and turn to paper, almost as if to make it easier for your heart to simply fall away and pass through you to the ground, or that a gust of wind could strike and blow you to dust.  It's so hard to find all the little bits of jewelry in progress, the carefully chosen palette of colored pens and pencils, hand made sales tags which say "Made by Sara" with her website address on them and not gasp for breath each time.

The pain reminds me of caring for my sweetie during her last days.  As that seemed a sacred trust, a painful walk across shards of glass which in some ways I could have easily passed on to others, but could not bear the guilt now if I had, nor could I bear the loss if I had missed one more moment of her consciousness because I had squirreled her away in some nursing home.  It would have been easier, much much easier but by no means better.  So in this same way I walk across glass as I sort little beads, ten types of pearls, five types of jasper and goodness knows how many types of rose quarts into freshly bought sorting trays.   Her sister Lynn is so kind and generous.  I know she is just a phone call and a plane flight away and she would come if I asked, but at the same time I know this is my place, my cross and to share it's weight would only add to the guilt I already feel for surviving and oh so many other things.

When I'm done with this step, I must progress to the art paper, the coloring and the photographs.   I don't know how I'm ever going to make it through.  Really, I don't.

Love as Shared Guilt

I've been going through some of Sara's notebooks... the French made, spiral bound kind with multiple sections of grid paper, each a different lovely soft pastel.   I can't tell you all how guilty it makes me feel to read some of it.  To read how lonely Sara was, and how guilty she felt at accepting gifts and money from me, directly or otherwise.

It's a stupid practice to go through these.  Sara can no longer defend or accuse me properly, or explain.  Feelings once recorded as vents become red hot skewers in the eyes of the surviving.   Unfixed personal habits which seemed so important at one point may have at the end been meaningless.

And I would let these all go, but I must admit, the red hot accusations contained in between shopping lists of beads and seeds are becoming precious to me for their palpability, their immediacy so mush so that I can almost reach out and touch "us" as we were before she was ill, the pain seems as real as the ring I carry around my neck into which Sara stamped "True Love."

So, to her readers and her fans, this is another reason why I didn't want to share my greif, becuase I didn't want to share my guilt, the huge gulf I left between the comfort I gave Sara and the love and affection she needed.  So please, do not wish me well, do not wish me to go on, or tell me to get over her.  This will not help me.  Instead, pray to Sara to forgive me that if I should see her again in some other life, she be not angry or spurn me but believe me when I say I did the best I knew how at the time, and will forever believe that I did far less than she deserved.