The love of my life.
We were together for twenty-seven years. We met at a private party, and something sparked between us in an instant. After just seven days we had already moved in together. If we ever disagreed, it was only ever about parenting, and even then only occasionally. Otherwise we never argued. We would sit down together and talk things through, and we talked a great deal. He never once raised his voice at me. He was always there for me, and together we always found a way through. What mattered to us was living with one another, not merely alongside one another. We read books and then spent hours retelling them to each other, debating them with real passion. He was my other half. We went out often, and I would sometimes surprise him with a spontaneous trip to the sea. We treasured our days together. He knew me so well that wherever his work took him in the world, he would always bring back clothing for me, exactly the right pieces, as though fitted by hand. I almost never had to buy slippers or underwear for myself. He always called me his little one.
His hair, kept as a memory.
We were devoted followers of traditional photography. We had prints developed and glued them into proper albums, year after year, with all kinds of other things tucked in alongside the photos. When Krzysiu died, our son went through everything and found, inside one of those albums, strands of hair from all of us. Krzysztof had hidden them there quietly, at some point in the past, as a private keepsake. What a discovery, because it meant I had something of him, something he had saved with his own hands, to be set into a piece of jewellery that could remain with me.
His words, carried from a love letter.
We did not only talk, we also wrote to each other by hand. A handwritten letter carries something that no electronic message ever could. To keep those words close to me always, I had passages from one of his letters engraved on a small bar pendant. That piece of jewellery lets me feel him near, every single day. It gives me the strength to carry this loss. When someone notices it and asks, I tell our story with pride.
Stories like this one move us deeply. We are grateful to be, through this small handcrafted piece, a part of it. Thank you.