The Sense of Tears in Things

It has been four years since I’ve touched this journal page. My original intention was to have my sister, Kathleen, help me develop it with her ideas and enviable creativity. Among many things, she was a writer and I wanted her to help me curate this part of my shop in a way only she could. She introduced me to the people & artists I hold dearest to my heart today. Her knowledge seemed infinite, her taste impeccable. I followed her blindly since I was a little girl. I loved the way she saw the world — the way she spoke, the way she dressed, the way she could find elegance in the most difficult moments. If you click back, three of the only four posts published were her — Ischia from her point of view, a photoshoot she styled in her alphabet city apartment, her as my model shot by her husband on film in the gardens of our hometown, Richmond, Virginia. It stops there because my life froze there. In June of 2023 I lost her and the year before, I knew I was going to. We were told in early Spring of 2022 that she only had one year left to live. Her cancer had changed and without warning, the hourglass of her life was turned upside down. I jumped on a flight home from Rome and sat on the floor of her apartment holding her hands with the finality of the news piercing and changing the shape of my heart in real time. One year left to live. She was only 36 years old. This began a new chapter of my life laden with grief, a deep well of sadness I had only seen in movies or read about in books was now my own secret sacred pain. The anticipatory grief of knowing time was slipping away and saying goodbye to the person I loved and needed most, of watching her die, of helping her die and then disappear, followed by the enormous pressure of living my life without her.

“There is a great deficit in the language around grief. It’s not something we are practiced as a society, because it is too hard to talk about and, more importantly, it is too hard to listen to. So many grieving people just remain silent, trapped in their own secret thoughts, trapped in their own minds, with their only form of company being the dead themselves.” -Nick Cave from Faith, Hope and Carnage

Over the last few years I wrote often and kept my words tightly clenched in my fists while I tried to navigate the days of sadness. I knew I was not special, I knew, of course, that everybody who was lucky enough to love or be loved knew or would know this pain in some shape or form at some point, many in much more tragic ways than my own. I knew that at the very least this was the bare minimum thread that connected me to those around me. But at the same time, I’ve never felt lonelier or more isolated. Not like a victim but more like a stranger walking among the living with my step closer to the dead because now Kathleen was there, not here.

When I scroll back through my writings — I call them fragments because they are often unfinished thoughts — I find a broken version of myself simultaneously clinging to a futile hope that maybe some magic treatment would come fix this mistake and giving up, surrendering to the end of her life as each week passed. A lot changed for me in such a short period of time. During the months before she died, I was also going through a separation, on the cusp of divorce. I’d moved back to my childhood home in Virginia to be with my family for her final year and when I was to return back to Italy after her death, I would not be going back to my home or the life I had been building. Every aspect of the following day was a question mark and for this reason, because of too much doubt and insecurity, many times I was tempted to close my shop and try to find a job where someone else had the pressure and responsibility to make decisions. I had drained my bank account to zero, my confidence disappearing with it. The stress and sadness of her death was wreaking havoc on my body physically, too, which is not something talked about often when we speak of grief. I had lost all pleasure in sourcing vintage and I could feel myself completely disconnecting from my work. The gloss of social media was nauseating me and I felt like a complete fraud myself posting airy photos to keep my business going while my life was crumbling around me. I had tethered myself and my livelihood to something I desperately wanted to disappear from and I felt stuck.

Last Christmas I decided to compile and print some of my fragments & poems I’d written during this time into a little book. I decided to name it The Sense of Tears in Things, adapted from a more poetic translation of the German word weltschmerz that has been used in literature since the 1800s to describe variations of melancholiness, it captured the way I am experiencing the world now — life is beautiful but inherently sad and grief is every where, in every thing, in every person. I have only shared my book with a few women who have also experienced untimely loss. I’ve been too shy to do much more with it. Or really, that’s not the point for me to do anything with it. Just to have something tangible to hand to someone or send to someone who maybe is hurting like me when our paths happen to cross. To acknowledge that I’ve gotten an enormous amount of solace in my darkest moments from hearing others’ stories of death, when others are open and honest about how much a loss has impacted their lives it makes me feel less lonely & maybe less like a failure for struggling sometimes still, and I don’t want to keep my experience so tightly locked in my body that it gets stuck there for the rest of my life. We are grief illiterate in our culture, so scared of saying the wrong thing we tend to not say anything at all. Or for me, too scared of burdening those around me with my grief I tend to keep quiet. Three years later and the pain, when it comes, is as physical and intense as it was the day I whispered I love you it’s ok I love you I love you I love you I love you while she took her last breath. I do know the amount of pain is in direct proportion to how much I loved her so it makes sense that it hurts so much — and I am the luckiest that she was mine for the first three decades of my life.

This journal will look very different than what I envisioned when I began it five years ago with the hope that Kathleen and I could work on it together. It would have been much better with her touch and her voice. But I would like to carve out a place away from the fleeting unreliable world of social media to share since all of this change over the last few years has impacted my work enormously. If you’ve been shopping with me from the beginning, you may notice that my vintage collections are getting smaller (something I want to talk about, too) while my in-house brand collections are growing. I’ve left Italy and now I live in France where my partner and I create each For Love of the Moon piece in our atelier. There are some other big changes I’m working on that I’m really excited and nervous about sharing and I will be talking more about this here in this space in the coming months. All of these changes are a result of trying to “unstuck” myself, of finding new ways to joy and calm and excitement. Sewing & designing have been part of that for me. There will be personal inspiration, music and books and poems and films, more conversations around grief and loss because why not talk about it sometimes? It’s a huge part of my life.

Here are a few fragments from A Sense of Tears in Things.