Nea Fane – Un Biet Român Pripășit în America / A Hapless Romanian Stuck in The US

UPDATE : at the end of this post are the pictures of the monument, installed.

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After Irina’s at least three-month of relentless research, emails from New Zealand to Canada, via Italy and Los Angeles, three nervous breakdowns, two days off from work (me), and a river of tears, we finally decided on the design, the text, the punctuation (!), the layout, the photo, the background, the granite color, and we put the deposit down.

Irina found this on a German website. Two email exchanges later she ended up in North Italy, talking with the manufacturer. “No ship to America. Bye.”

The guy at the Monuments’ Shoppe (in Arizona) almost fell off his chair when we showed up with a 1:1 scale carton cutout [of the above monument], with all the sizes marked on it, and all the details.

The blue glass (also seen in the photo above) proved to be such a big challenge, that we ended up deciding on the “no glass” option. And this after we finally found a super nice lady from Canada, able and willing to make a custom blue glass cross. She was asking only for $2,000 + shipping, while the sculptor from San Francisco wanted $18,000 (I think he thought that he had to do the whole monument, no idea why so much. Anyway, he was kind of a world known glass artist, I don’t even know Irina got to him). A lady from New Zealand wanted $10,000 + $2,500 shipping. The local Gilbert artist bargained with Irina for only $7,000, down from $10,000. Maybe, maybe, we had chosen one of the artists, but the Arizona sun being as hot as it is, we were afraid of the glass cracking or fading. Plus, being something nobody did before here, to get it installed would have been, as I said, a big challenge.

Plus, this would have defied the main idea we started from: to be something simple, not very different, yet not the same as all the other monuments, and decently priced. Cosmin somehow would have had the most unusual, expensive monument in the cemetery.

The very next day (after the down payment, when I thought everything was decided), first thing, before even saying “good morning”, Irina said to me: “we have to change the photo background!” And so, we almost started again…

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One week before the one year anniversary the monument got installed. Re-reading what I wrote in July I can make the following observations:
* Cosmin has the most beautiful and unusual monument, without being too obviously “in your face”
* No glass choice is a good choice – the guys from Western Monument told us that indeed the sun destroys everything and, if anything is left, the hard water finishes the job, and not in a good way
* No glass choice is a great choice: “The nothing is everything” – a friend of mine said, and I’m sure Cosmin would have loved this, my little philosopher that he was