Waves of Loss
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This column was going to be about something else. A much-ballyhooed local residential building recently opened in the Oak Lawn area. Its poor execution and shoddy construction really irritated me; I had planned on panning it with gusto.
Then the unfathomable happened.
An earthquake, deep in the middle of the Indian Ocean, created a series of tsunamis, which at this writing has killed more than 200,000 people. By the time you read this, the toll will have risen. Unlike the badly designed building I’d been stewing over, the tidal waves were a force of nature, not of man. There’s something truly helpless in that realization. For some directly affected, helplessness turned to hopelessness.
Fernando Bengoechea was a gifted photographer, whose luminous images appeared in Elle Decor, House & Garden and Vanity Fair, among many other magazines. He was respected, admired, and truly loved by almost everyone. I was lucky enough to have known him. He was the kind of person that I immediately liked and was looking forward to working with. Bengoechea, who was vacationing in Sri Lanka with his boyfriend Nate Berkus, died in the tsunami. Berkus survived.
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When the towers fell on September 11, my friend and colleague Southern Accents editor Karen Carroll and I were writing Christmas captions. Nothing seemed more absurd at the time. We talked about it on the phone, deciding that we had to press on, to show those who had attacked our country and killed Christians, Jews, Muslims, agnostics, and atheists that they had not won. By writing captions, life would go on. Our jobs were to capture beauty, to have Christmas, to show attractive rooms, parties, fabrics, and furniture. Because that’s what we do.
Bengoechea understood this, too. His job was to capture beauty in his lens.
Something bigger than the bonds that hold friends and colleagues together has shaken us. It has shaken me. It has shaken most of the people I know in our business. By the time you read this, Dominique Browning with House & Garden will have written about it. As will have Paige Rense of Architectural Digest. And Peggy Russell at Elle Decor. If they haven’t written about it, they most likely will have done whatever they could to help.
As editors and writers and lovers of design, we are all connected. As human beings, we are one.
The flood of e-mails that came into our office from the design industry regarding how to help the displaced survivors of this tragedy was astounding. I stopped counting at 750. Companies that manufacture cast-bronze fittings meant for chandeliers and manor house stair rails sent their products to hold up tents in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and India. Small European fabric houses with limited financial resources, who can only afford to make their exquisite textiles to order, donated bolts of their finest velvets, silk damasks, and embroidered brocades to be used as shelter, clothing, and shrouds.
In the midst of devastation, there is hope and love.
