Cloth, Color and the Long Goodbye
I’ve been thinking about how women, for millennia, have put their joys and sorrows into their hand work. I’m a fifth generation Kansan, and have often thought about women in covered wagons, or living in sod homes on the prairie, imagining them quilting or embroidering to tend to their family needs and to feed their souls. I have thought about Native women and their intricate and beautiful beadwork and quill work. And about the long traditions of weaving, knitting, quilting, embroidery, tatting, clothes-making, and the way these are used to work through hardships and happiness, one stitch at a time.
“I make my quilts fast so my children don’t freeze and beautiful so my heart doesn’t break.”
Last year, my sweetheart Keith died. He was old, but not really expected to die, so it was shocking and shattering. I had no experience or blueprint for how to be with both my deep sorrow at losing him and my incredible joy at having known this fine man. I floundered. I let myself be lost. I was angry and sad and confused.
After a few weeks, I started to ask myself: “Might find my own piece of handwork for making my way through this grief?”
I remembered that I had a thick Irish cotton shirt that he had given me because a pack rat had eaten a hole in it. I had thought I would just cut it up and use the fabric in some fiber art piece. But after he died, I started looking at it and thinking it might hold my grief and help me to work through my sorrow.
I’ve been a journal quilter for over 20 years and what that means is that most of the art that I have done has been in response to some inner confusion. When I have a life problem I don’t know how to solve or I’m working out some ancient angst that doesn’t serve my life, I let fabric, thread and color guide me on how to get through it. I have made hundreds of journal quilts on various topics: intimacy, vision, illness, and sadness.
The very first journal quilt I made was in response to my brother Verne’s death. He was younger than me and I had no idea what to do with my grief. So, I just started putting together little pieces of fabric in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep. The result was a very ragged, messy, but crushable little quilt that I could hold onto and cry into. This was so useful to me that in one way or another journal quilting became the only art I have done for the last 20+ years.
“Verne’s Death”
So, I picked up Keith’s shirt with the pack rat holes, my needles and colorful thread, and began.
I didn’t plan it. I simply stitched one element, and then I looked to where that element led me next. I did it while I sat in the garden, while I sat at on the stone sofa in the lotus patch, while I re-watched our favorite foreign films, and while sitting around with friends after dinner. I wasn’t trying to make something good or even pleasing to look at.
The poet Andrea Gibson died a week or so after Keith and her beautiful quotes around death and grief were all over social media, so I borrowed some of her quotes and embroidered them onto the shirt.
“In the end i want my heart to be covered in stretch marks.”
-Andrea Gibson.
A big quilted turtle covered part of the back, since he was someone who always carried a shovel with him so he’d be able to rescue turtles off the road.
“ Now that you died, who will rescue the turtles?”
I filled in the holes from the pack rat with webs of thread, thinking of spiders and the webs of life.
I put familiar and favorite things in the pocket: a stone chisel, a pair of broken reading glasses, a long chain of keys like he always carried in his pocket. The lotus he had given me bloomed around the time he died so I included a photo of the lotus flower and one of the dried lotus seed pods in the pocket of the shirt.
I assumed I could work on this shirt forever since my joys and sorrows ran so deep. Then, one day I woke up and said out loud, so that the whole world could hear: “IT IS FINISHED.”
Like a lotus flower, my heart opened. Like a lotus flower begins as a pink flower and then transforms into creamy white, my heart was transforming from heartbreak to heartache.
I started to imagine my life now without him in it. The very next day I began looking forward and making plans for the first time since he had died.
Just sitting with the shirt in my living room for a month or so, I realized that the shirt was meant to be an offering. I wanted to take my joys and sorrows and use them to feed the earth and its creatures and all that is holy.
The shirt became a prayer flag, to be hung in my garden so that it can shred and go back to the Earth. Each of the threads carrying a piece of Keith and my grief. So I hung it in the garden on a cold winter day.
I imagine that eventually the birds will use the cotton fibers to make their nests and the wasps will crawl in the pocket to make their home. Caterpillars will attach their cocoons to the hem, and once they become butterflies, they will pump up their new wings on the softness of the shoulder.
The stone chisel may take hundreds of years to rust into the soil, but for all that time the memory of Keith’s artistry with stone will be seeping back into the earth. Eventually the blue rubber bands will dry up and crumble away. Even the colors of the stitching and the fabric itself will fade into sunlight and air, feeding all creatures who breathe.
Keith was a man who lived close to the earth. He was not religious, but he understood the holiness of the natural world. He noticed everything in his surroundings and quietly observed every creature. Over 78 years, he studied their ways and respected their wisdom. His reverence was practical, without a hint of woo‑woo.
Letting this holy receptacle of my grief, sorrow, and joy return to the earth feels like the perfect way to honor him. It is also a way to let the earth, sun, wind, and rain continually metabolize my grief, to allow freezing and thawing to slowly break down the fibers of my sorrow.
I am a novice at grief and often lost when it comes to excavating each new layer. But I trust my hands and the way they connect directly to my heart. They become the vehicle that transforms my grief and love into a beauty that feeds the world.
I trust the healing power of color and the spark of possibility it carries. I trust the way thread holds together things that seem like they could never stick. I trust my heart and its ability to heal. And I trust the earth and its creatures to hold me through this long road of mourning.
A dream after he died: “GinaK: I am stranded. Can you come get me?”
“Grief is praise because it is Love’s way of honoring what it misses.”
-Martin Prechtel
