Years ago, in the hospital with a serious infection, I endured painful infusions of IV antibiotics. The drugs did wonders for my white-cell count, but burned the veins going in, leaving my arm red and puffy. I dreaded the twice-daily dose. Every twelve hours, when a nurse walked in with the IV bag, I felt my eyes fill with tears.
My husband had brought me a Walkman, along with tapes of my favorite albums. I discovered that listening to music during the IV infusions made the treatments go more quickly. Now I know that paying attention to something else decreases our brain’s ability to perceive pain, for complicated neurochemical reasons that I, as an English professor, can’t quite articulate. At the time, though, I had an alternative explanation, one that still seems valid to me. The pain seemed to stop time, but music is audible time. Listening to music meant that I literally heard time passing, which kept me from feeling stuck in the agony of the IV treatment. Each measure of music promised that the pain would end.
A few months ago, I taught myself to knit. The idea had appealed to me for a few years, and then I started having dreams about it. And then I read about the popular ministry of making prayer shawls and immediately wanted to make one myself. Prayer shawls are simple, useful projects that mean a great deal both to their creators and to their recipients. At the hospital where I volunteer as an ER chaplain, I often joke with patients that warm blankets are our most potent medicine, far more comforting than morphine. Knitting prayer shawls would allow me to make warm blankets for people I loved.
A dear friend’s husband had just entered hospice care after years of cancer treatments.
My first shawl would be for her.
I loved knitting right away, but of course it took practice for me to become good at it. The first few inches of that first shawl are, shall we say, somewhat rough. But I kept going, the urgency of the project overcoming my habitual perfectionism. Bill, my friend’s husband, didn’t have much time. I wanted to give her the shawl before he died. And so I ploughed doggedly ahead, correcting errors when I could and knitting through them when I couldn’t.
I quickly realized that just as music had been audible time for me when I was in the hospital, knitting was visible time. Because I was a slow beginner, each inch of the shawl took me about an hour. As the project grew, I had a poignant sense of keeping a kind of countdown, of knitting towards the end of a life. And yet, just as music had in the hospital, knitting calmed me. Every morning when I got up, often before dawn, I lit a candle and knit for half an hour. Even though time was short, I wasn’t paralyzed by fear.
I knew what I had to do next: I had to knit the next stitch, just as my friend and her husband had to do whatever the next best thing was for them in that moment.
In the middle of knitting that first shawl, I learned that my cousin Scott was gravely ill, in the ICU and not expected to survive. One morning at 6:15, the phone rang. It was Scott’s sister calling to tell me that he had died.
It was still dark and the house was very quiet. Too stunned for tears, I got up in the echoing silence and went into my study. I lit my knitting candle, opened the bag where the knitting lives to protect it from our three cats and picked up my needles.
I was working the shawl in a “trinity stitch,” which produces a basket-weave pattern. Knit three purl three, to the end of the row: knit, knit, knit, purl, purl, purl. Breathe between stitches.
Knit sounds like Scott and purl sounds like Bill. So my knitting that morning became a murmured prayer. Scott, Scott, Scott, Bill, Bill, Bill. When I learned that Scott was dead, time had seemed to open, to become a bleak void I did not know how to navigate. My knitting, like the threads or breadcrumbs that guide wanderers in myths and fairy tales, led me through that darkness. Each moment, I knitted the next stitch. That movement assured me that time was passing. I could see time growing beneath my hands, becoming a soft and comforting garment. Time would bring me and everyone I knew to terrible grief, but time would also carry us into the place where we could bear that grief.
Knitting promised me that time would not stop, and it gave me a task I could accomplish: to knit the next stitch, to do the next small needful thing, even through loss and sorrow.
