REFABRICATING

When my husband left our marriage more than 20 years ago, he left some items behind and I have carried them with me, unable to let them go, for reasons inexplicable even to myself.

In March I learnt of his death and in May, during a break in lockdown, I met with his family with whom I had had no contact since his departure, at his wake. This was held in an iconic restaurant in a beach front suburb where he and I had spent so many hours in the initial carefree days of our love affair and in the subsequent years of successful careers, expensive cars and unbridled hedonism, typical of the 1980`s.

At his wake we drank Bollinger and watched the sea roil, the skies become leaden and the wind gust so that we could not scatter his ashes. Such weather seemed perhaps a metaphor for the years since I had known him but that is not my story to tell. I could see him in a beautifully cut suit with the silk ties he preferred, standing beside his mother also an icon of style who had died young and whilst we were still married. They were looking out to sea together, glasses of champagne in hand, perfectly content. In that image, I found solace.

My husband and I never divorced. I deluded myself that this was a mere technicality, however his death, of course, opened wounds I believed long healed. To staunch the bleeding, felt keenly in the isolation of this pandemic, I have immersed myself in the items he left behind all those years ago. I have spent these past months tearing and fabricating and wrapping the loose ends of a marriage finally completed by a death.

In a long process which has scoured my emotional landscape, they have been transformed into objects almost despite me and which I find unexpected. In completing them I have found solace.

There is the Silk Tie Quilt for the man who was a peacock about his neckwear. It is vibrant and playful and unexpected. Like the man.

There is the Sarong Bag to hold the quilt. Worn and weak in parts , it was the man relaxed.

And finally there is a bear made from a scarf

his mother gave him which had perished in

places but retained enough fabric to be made

up into this little fellow. I find him poignant.

Of course, just as I think I have finished, I find a loose thread, or an unsown seam and over time I have come to realise that life will always be a little unfinished. As a person who has often been compelled toward some idea of perfect completion, there is such a freedom in this awareness.

Somewhere in this material odyssey I have found a way to find peace with the man I married and the journey we shared.