Memorial

The thing about the rite of passage called Death is that it isn't the final word. I don't mean that in a transcendental sense, but in how do you do something in stone that is fitting and says all the right things, while not being too ostentatious but at the same time recognising that both my parents marched to the beat of their very own, unique and occasionally odd, drum. I fell in love with this piece of stone (my funeral director has a copy standing in their office). A lot of stones are black, or grey. This one is moss green, it has life and colour. My parents were lively and pretty damn colourful. My dad may have been a banker, but he came from a family whose background was piano making (although my great-grandfather had been a purveyor of fine cigars before he was a supplier of parts and builder of pianos). He loved music. And art and books and travel and history… and my mother. He called her Blackbird. (And a lot more about that later). My mother was an actress, and an artist (most of the paintings I am taking away with me are hers). She was maddeningly illogical, and frankly as crazy as June Bug… she had no filter, if it was on her mind, she said it. She was passionate and a bit wild, and unstable as heck, but she desperately wanted to be conventional, she just didn't know how. If you really want to know why I am a socially peculiar oddball, you really need to look no further than my parents, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

So, I want to immortalise all that life, colour and strangeness in stone. I love the shape of this, it's not the traditional, but it has overtones of tradition. I love the garlands, the place for the family initial, and the fact that I can have a blackbird laser-etched into the surface. I just have to come up with the right words to go with it all.