heavy heart

The last few weeks have been a blur and I had all kinds of new work to post and fun things to share but none of that seems very important now. My dear sweet friend Yukiko has been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. I can’t even wrap my mind around this, it doesn’t seem real. The picture above is from 2005 when I went to Tokyo to be part of her wedding. It was a life changing trip and for ten days the newly weds took me on a tour of Japan. We ate strange foods (squid for breakfast!) and went to the cherry blossom festival. My heart is heavy for Yukiko and her family. She is such an incredible person .. a wonderful mother to her little girl, a beautiful artist, a loyal and true friend. She’s been sending me e-mails from the hospital in Japan telling me not to worry, which after living together for two years she knows is a joke. The one thing that I do know is this, I’ve never met a stronger person then Yukiko and if anyone is going to kick cancer it’s her. When she was 15 she wrote her mother a letter every day for a year begging for permission to come to the U.S. as an exchange student. Finally her mother caved in and she ended up with a family in Wisconsin until she graduated from high school. She  then went to NYC to attend The School of Visual Arts. We met in Cleveland. Her cubicle at American Greetings was next to mine.  She got a job offer in California at a small start-up animation company and promised to take me with her. Two weeks after she left I had an interview at that same company in San Jose. A month later I was driving cross country with all of my belongings crammed in the back of my Honda and a bed strapped to the roof.  Many adventures can be traced back to Yukiko. She is a quiet spark that begs the question…”why not just try it.”  The night before I heard this terrible news I was in bed rattling  off all these “wants” Wanting to move forward into book illustration, surface design, and product licensing. Wanting to be a better artist. Wanting to figure out if, where and when we are going to buy a house. Now none of that noise seems to matter and I’m guessing it never did.