I stopped sewing when my son died.
Like most people who lose a child I was thrown into a world I had never hoped to know and would never wish on anyone. Just days before I had sewn what would be his “coming home” outfit… it might have possibly been the most perfect thing I had ever created. The white knit with the soft little bear print. Tiny pearl buttons on the the bunting style jacket and little white snaps and now it would be the outfit that he wore as we said goodbye.
I could not even walk towards my machine without being rolled over by waves of grief. So much so that I put it away. I had sewn since I was a young girl and now I shoved my machine under a table and tried to forget.
It might have worked if it were not for my busy hands. You know, the type that always needed to be doing something. Something about idle hands and the devil I suppose, but in this case the devil was grief.
I started Knitting because my son died.
I took up knitting with a vengeance, far enough away from a sewing machine but still a craft for someone who has never been really good at idle time. I shopped for yarn or solace, anymore I am not sure which I needed more. I knit like my life depended on it, and perhaps it did.
One simple stitch after another, a ritual, a prayer, a desperate hope for a night when i could bring my head to the pillow without replaying his loss and feeling that hole in my chest big enough to drive a truck through so I would get up again and sit int he dark and knit some more.
The days passed like stitches one and another on my needles and off again. Soon there was a flutter deep within me.. another life, another chance, another baby and I kept knitting. This time small things, again like casting on hope, or worry beads or prayer or a little of both.
Baby number six grew quickly within me and there was not a day I did not knit or think of the brother he would never know. I was not ready to sew again but I did on occasion cast my eyes towards the machine as it sat there waiting for me… for my grief to ebb with the days, with the baby growing inside of me.
Gabriel Liam would have been 17 years old today. A young man who’s memory is knitted into thousands of stitches and in the work of busy hands.
