This blog is just over 2 years old, and I haven't made any entries since December 2015. To be completely honest, I've planning on detailing my yarn adventures since then, but I've been stuck. Not stuck in the sense that I've been in the same place for the past year and a half, but more like I've shattered into a million pieces and have just recently started to put myself back together.
What could precipitate such a dramatic disintegration of self?
Before I answer that, let me take you back to 2014. In August, I gave birth to a sweet baby girl, Victoria. Prior to her arrival, hubby and I learned that she had several congenital heart defects, which could have been easily corrected separately, but all together made an impossible situation.
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| Victoria, about 12 hours old and miraculously breathing on her own. |
Fast forward through her initial 3 month hospital stay, 2 major heart surgeries, multiple cardiac catherizations, and we arrive in March 2016. By this time, I had expended all my energy on keeping Victoria alive and caring for her, and I was running on fumes. Then the unthinkable happened. On 26 March, I put Victoria to bed after having dinner with my family. Within a few minutes, I heard shriek resonate from Victoria's room. I ran in and found her in her bed, purple in the face and convulsing. Hubby and I raced her to the hospital where doctors and nurses tried for over an hour to revive her, but their efforts were in vain. In the early hours of 27 March, my baby girl was gone.
In the first 48 hours after Victoria left, I was in shock and completely lost. It wasn't until the third day, the day hubby and I went to formally identify our daughter's corpse, that I thought up a way to work through my grief: knit a funeral shroud with which Victoria could be cremated. I had the perfect pattern, too. Bernat's Gift of Love Afghan had been sitting in my library forever. Traditionally, white is a mourning colour in Chinese, so I chose an off white merino from my stash and cast on.
For the next two weeks, I knitted like a maniac. I was knitting from dawn to dusk and the wee hours in between. I channeled all my grief and heart ache into knitting, and 60,317 stitches later (that's an average of 4,308 stitches per day), and on the day I said my final goodbye to Victoria, I felt empty. Within three hours of finishing the afghan (I neglected to knit the border because there really was not enough time), the afghan was laid on Victoria, then they were sent off for cremation.
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| My last gift of love to Victoria, including a quickly knit tunic in which Victoria was cremated |
I've knit pretty much every day since then. Every stitch has been a sort a meditation, focusing my mind and forcing me to live in the present. And here I am, 19 months later, finally starting to feel like myself again. Let's see where my stitches take me next.
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| One of the last photos taken of Victoria and me together. |
