What You Never Thought About Grief
Crafting and Healing
"She passed."
As they were spoken, I was wounded. I tried dodging the words in my mind as I continued enquiring: "who? her sister?...No, you mean her sister?."
"No. She passed."
As I continue to try erasing the words in an attempt to rewind time, to somehow make the reality untrue, I walked numbly around the living room.
She passed, no goodbyes, no grandiose apparitions of her spirit anywhere so that I had at least something to hold on to about my last moments with her. Nothing. The world, my responsibilities, daily life; everything was the same. Nothing in the air spoke of her no longer being in this world. And, yet... everything crumbled.
My mind was searching incessantly to just reconstruct those last words, the last moments: where were they? It was a whirlwind while I continue walking and crying around looking to leave, to fly to be home with my family, to hopefully find out that she was still there, alive.
It must have been a reflex, but I was sitting on a plane to Puerto Rico and I had all I needed to keep my mind busy: my yarn, my hooks, my scissors. All of a sudden I was resuming my crafting, after years of pause, in an autopilot mode.
That's how it began, not my love for crochet and knitting, but going to it as second nature to process deep existential trends in my mind. Now, every piece has a story of my life embedded.
That December, as I was flying to be with my family, my hands found themselves working on a newborn project. I didn't plan it. It was already started and it was the one I had picked mindlessly while packing. In hindsight, it seems poetic to be making something for a new life when another one had shifted into something else. I continue working on the project as I traversed all those surreal ceremonies and processes of saying our last goodbyes.
At the end of my trip, I had created something beautiful: a craft. But it was also the product of what I like to call: a stanza in the poem of my life. This was not any craft: it was the way in which I was able to stay standing in the middle of profound pain. I had spent my days building a nurturing cradle for myself where every cut, thread, and knot was a meaningful lullaby.
The newborn piece ended up representing my last memory of being with her. It was the way in which I ended up processing our memories, the way in which her memories sustained me, and the way in which I co-created the future her in me.
I knew then and there she would remain with me forever because my relationship with crafting was transformed. She was never a crocheter or a knitter, she was a seamstress. I have tried sewing, but I am not as gifted as she was. However, it was during her death that my genre of art touched a bit of hers: as I look into my hands creating, I see hers; as I cut with my scissors, I'm reminded of hers. She used to make me dresses and nightgowns when I was a little girl and I sent her away with a newborn outfit to wear for the first time on that other life.
Nowadays, she is still with me in crafting: she still holds my hands, she still guides the needles and hooks. And, as I process other stanzas of my life, she continues alongside me sewing/knitting/crocheting my cradle and singing me lullabies.
About the Creator
Jara Rios Rodriguez
Professor, thinker, poet, reflectionist, seeker.
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