Years ago, someone from my then-knitting group (which would gradually dissolve as people moved away), a staff member at Packard Children’s Hospital, was diagnosed with cancer. It was when they started her chemo that they found she had an autoimmune liver disease and could not take the treatments.
Lenore faded pretty quickly.
Near the end, she offered our group her yarn, having no family of her own to pass it down to, and I looked her in the eyes in a quiet moment and promised her I would make something beautiful from it to remember her by; she was grateful, with tears.
None of which, to be honest, had the remotest appeal. Just, none. I wanted it to but it adamantly refused to comply.
And I felt guilty about that. I had promised. It had meant so much to her.
I was cleaning out some old stuff today and came across a stitch sampler that had been among those itchy scratchy hideous s0-not-my-color yarns. It was knitted very tightly, like a good solid old Irish sweater. Way too short to be a scarf, way too funky shaped to be, say, a hotpad, way too much work to just toss aside; she’d put a lot of time into it when time had been the one thing she had had so little of left.
This time I put it around my neck and imagined it sewn shut at the ends as a small cowl.
You’d want a thick turtleneck under it to protect from the itch, but, yes! At last. She herself had made the pretty thing to remember her by.
And I do.