Grief Knitting and Death Cooties
We have a lot of knitters in my family. I knit. Two of my sisters are knitters, three of our daughters, one daughter-in-law, and one granddaughter also knit. And in my daughter Kathy’s case, two sisters-in-law and one of their friends either knit or are learning to knit. And I have a small group of friends who meet at my house on Tuesday mornings to knit for charity and for themselves, so I know from whence I speak when I say that knitting can be a godsend when grief of any kind strikes.
Grief can scramble your brain causing your normal train of thought to derail, or maybe just pushing all regular concerns onto a back burner as grief sucks up all your mental energy. You may be able to function in reasonable fashion when there are things that need to be done, but it all goes to hell in a handbasket as soon as you are once again at loose ends.
The rule of thumb in my family is to always keep several balls of cotton dishcloth yarn on hand. Sounds stupid, I know, but while most knitting requires some thought, knitting dishrags doesn’t. You cast on X-number of stitches (almost any number will do) and you just start knitting with any size needles you have on hand. It doesn’t matter. You just start knitting, back and forth and then back again. You have holes in your work? Dropped stitches? It looks like something the cat has dragged in? It. Does. Not. Matter. Just keep knitting. It is thoughtless, mindless, repetitive busy-work that occupies you enough to keep you from pacing back and forth, wringing your hands, crying, swearing, or whatever it is that you tend to do when grief becomes more than you can bear.
We have had more than our share of that kind of grief in recent years, and as a result I have accumulated literally dozens of multicolored dishrags, most with their tails (the end strand of yarn normally woven back in once the piece is finished) still hanging like umbilical cords. I knit them, but I don’t like to use them, and so I eagerly hand them out to unsuspecting friends who exhibit even a casual interest in them. But like with the fishes and the loaves, the more I give, the more I seem to have. In fact, I recently unearthed yet another small stash of them just last week.
Grief knitting doesn’t always have to be totally mindless, however. Sometimes it’s just an “any port in a storm” kind of thing, like when I sat by my son’s bedside, keeping vigil as I knew he was dying. I picked up the mittens I had been working on and just kept knitting. Which brings me to another related subject we refer to in my family, for lack of a better word, as Death Cooties.
After Rick died I couldn’t bear to even look at the mittens I had been knitting. Just one look and I was back in the moment again. Feeling silly and even kind of stupid, I finally pulled the damn things off the needles and tossed them into the trash. It wasn’t until months later when my daughter Kathy confessed to doing the same thing with a sweater she had been working on when her father died that I realized it wasn’t just me. She and her cousin Kelly were talking about things that held such a strong association with the death of a loved one that they simply could not tolerate having them around any longer. Such things were deemed to be covered in death cooties and simply had to go.
