Dear Sara


Written on June 1st, the second anniversary of the death of my dear friend Sara. I wasn’t going to share it because it’s so difficult to open up these raw and wounded things, but I’ve been so touched and prodded lately by others’ shared stories of grief, so here it is.

Dear Sara,

When you were dying – in the very short spaces where I let myself really know that you were – I thought I knew when I would miss you. And I was right – I miss you today, on the anniversary of your death, on my birthday, on yours. I miss you whenever I see Ewan McGregor. When I’m home and drive by Puccini’s and when I go to the drugstore to stock up on candy before a movie. Whenever someone says that they hated Moulin Rouge with a roll of their eyes (in my head I always imagine your exasperated response).  Whenever I want to talk about the complexities of family. I will miss you dearly when I marry and in weak moments I let myself imagine you there, grinning at me.

But I never could have known this.

I never really call myself an artist. And by never really, I mean that I don’t – ever. I’ve thought a lot about why in this past year. How easily I bestow the label on others. How it feels like something that I can’t claim, without risking the dreaded omg-who-does-she-think-she-is.  Why I care who people think I am. If I should. I try to push myself, to find my voice, to say what I need to say, but I do so quietly and behind-the-scenes, leaving things uncreated and unsaid and unpublished.

I remember how it felt when you called me an artist.  You threw it out so casually and so often, ignoring the way my eyes widened in protest, in please-don’t-tell-them-that.  You did so long before I even found my medium. When I was sitting next to you at Herron, trying so hard to transfer what was in my head onto the paper, trying and failing to bend the colors to my will. You always made it look so effortless and I humped along and I never understood how I got to be a part of this “we.” This we who were artists, who created things. You were an artist and you looked the way artists should look and you talked the way artists should talk. Everything was altered under your touch – your hair a daily sculpture, your car a political statement, your skirts shortened, your jeans tattered.  I was the opposite of an artist — cerebral, a reader who parted my hair in the middle and wore prairie skirts and made lists and got lost in my own head.

But when I came over you would have two canvasses gessoed and you’d haul out your paints and we’d sit in the front yard and I would say what should I paint? And you would say, whatever you want to paint! You always said this while already painting. And so I would paint because when someone hands you all the tools and sits beside you, what else are you going to do?

Your paintings were always vibrant and full and sometimes tortured, though I’m not sure you ever saw them that way. You painted the things you knew and the things you wished you knew and the things you were trying to teach yourself. I remember when you brought your painting of Che into school – the one that said “A true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love” –  everyone one loved it and no one knew quite what it meant. And I thought well no, sometimes revolutionaries are guided by thirst for power or struggle over the control of resources or plain blood sport. But I looked at your painting and I wanted to believe it. That was the power that your art had.

My paintings were horrible by anyone’s estimation. They lacked all detail or nuance or cohesion. They were often quite thick because I just layered paint over paint, hoping that it would turn into something worth seeing. I worried about wasting your paint because nothing ever came of it but it never bothered you. I wished I had something to say, that I was sure like you.

You called me an artist to my face and I’d say oh I’m no artist. And you’d scrunch your nose and say Sierra, of course you are, you make art, don’t you? And I’d say I guess so, but in my head I knew that I wasn’t. There were other requirements and I didn’t fill any of them. And now, when we’re out and I hear friends tell someone she’s a photographer, and they look at me head-cocked, I rush to add oh it’s just a hobby or yeah, I take pictures. I see you just over their shoulder, shaking your head.

I know it’s not just a hobby. Because I see beauty everywhere, and sadness too. Because I have things I need to say. Because when I don’t make time to create, something essential in me withers. I realize now that you were feeding this before I even knew I was hungry and in these moments when I inch closer to naming myself I miss you so deeply it feels like I might break.

Love, Sierra