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Our Lady of Sorrows

14 January 1922 — 15 September 2008

This was my mother.

When she died, she was in severe distress. This was after a number of days in growing pain, after a few years of daily discomfort and a growing frustration with being capable of less and less.

I knew it was coming, I could tell. There were events that I knew would bring it about–my aunt dying last month, and years before that her sisters moving completely out of her reach, where each of them would suffer from the separation with their own personal sickness of loss. Alzheimer’s for one, cancer for the other. Leukemia was my mother’s last diagnosis, post-mortem. It was, apparently, in its nascent, turbulent acute stage–white blood cells all cytoblasts; red blood cells almost extinct. Like a rousing, futile, furious last ditch effort against an insurmountable invading virus. Death.

I always thought I’d be completely prepared, as she was 86 and she was in pain–I also knew, as she went along, that her very mild heart condition would turn into full blown heart failure. I even knew, about a week ago, when it had started to happen. There was a moment when the paramedics were taking her to the ambulance, our eyes locked and I realized in my bones that she would not be coming home, she was telling me goodbye, telling me she loved me, telling me that that was it. But even then I followed her to the hospital, feeling like I had time, hoping against all hope I’d meet her best doctor doing his rounds. I did meet him while walking in, then I heard him being paged to her room in emergency. And I knew.

She could not be stabilized, she went wildly down, then wildly up as one organ after another failed. Morphine calmed her and the monitor over her bed slowed till her blood pressure disappeared, the alarms sounding at first, and then silenced while every one of the displays turned into flat lines and question marks. Morphine masquerades as a legitimate painkiller but it’s the only euthanasia we can get away with, too much and everything causing the pain is crushed in its beneficent paralysis. And that was it. No more distress and no more pain but Holy Fuck, she was just gone.

Oh, no.

Yves Henri Donat Mathieu Saint Laurent has died.

A young Yves Saint Laurent posing for one of his first YSL perfume ads.
Nude. Except for the glasses.

One of the most ingenious innovations of twentieth century clothing design: masculine elements in women’s clothing, an androgyny that becomes ultra feminine. (Le Smoking, 1960’s-2000’s)

Saint Laurent’s very first dress design for Christian Dior, 1955

I don’t think I can count the number of ways Yves Saint Laurent has influenced everything to do with style, and, by extension, everything to do with culture, what we perceive as beautiful. He was the first to ignore the colour barrier on the runway and feature his clothing on women from the Caribbean, Africa, South America, Asia and parts of Eastern Europe. That forced our definition of “beauty” to expand outside of its limited “white, well heeled, well-dressed” dictate: no small feat. He took aesthetic risks but minimized them always by executing the designs using the most precise craftsmanship, exquisite detail, luxurious materials, and a concentrated dedication to enhancing the feminine form in a completely wearable way. What he created decades ago still looks timeless, effortlessly elegant, and fresh.

He just made so many beautiful things, it’s easy to underestimate their impact, to think of his work as trivial. It was anything but that. And I’m going to miss him.