More death and knitting

So, it seems like this blog has been full of death and divorce and sadness and well, knitting, for several years now. Again, our family is experiencing the death of someone dear to us. My Aunt Steph's mother in law, Grandma Berta, passed away yesterday. I grew up with Grandma Berta as a kind of peripheral relative, my cousins' grandma. It's sad, though, because I don't remember life when Grandma Berta wasn't part of my family, and because my cousins have had to deal with so much death this year, both their grandmas and my aunt and their dad, Uncle Slim, who died about six and a half years ago. You never really get over the death of your father, though, there are always those unhealed wounds, the complete love you have for that person whether they were a good dad or not. My Uncle Slim was a good dad. He loved his children, he did all he could for them, and we all miss him.

When my uncle Slim died  it was the most significant death in our family in years. I went through a kind of depression that lasted more than a year after he died, which was kind of what prompted my foray into Second Life and then into WoW and led to me meeting my  husband. Yeah, my life took a whole new direction after that, some of it not good. I can trace that path so clearly now: death, depression, move into a new (virtual world), and meet my future husband (plus countless friends I couldn't imagine being without, even if I've not met all of them in person). At the time it felt like chaos though.

When my house burned down in 2006 it was kind of like a catharsis, where everything in my old life, the thing that was weighing me down, was gone. And we had a few clear years, though health issues have also brought their weight to bear. And now a year of deaths, from my young cousin in March last year to my aunt in April, my grandma, after a summer of constant health issues, passed in late August, and now another grandma is gone. In between all of that are the family making its adjustments, everyone grieving in their own ways, not all of them positive. Like, I haven't talked to some of my close cousins in, well, four or five months, and  I don't see us healing from any of the things that have happened very soon either. I don't want to forgive them, I don't want to be forgiven by them, I just want to ignore all of that until it goes away, which isn't really a good way to deal with anything, but the hurt and disgust they've caused is hard to bear, and I'm so angry at them. I want to heal up a bit before I ever have to deal with that again.

My point, I guess, is that it seems like when death strikes we have different ways of coping, and somehow in times of tragedy, in the aftermath of the grief, new paths open up. We escape the sad literal present and try to move in new directions, try to find ways to heal and sometimes it causes us to learn to live differently, to find whole new ways of being. I don't know what will come in the next few months or year, but I suspect it will be great change again. New ways of being. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know. I guess we wait and see.

I'm making a lace scarf. It's this one, Chinook Scarf, by Ali Green. I'm using my own handspun Shetland wool for it. It's nice knitting, though the yarn for it feels rough to me and it's full of vm (which is Spinner-speak for "vegetable matter", meaning bits of straw and things). It's my learner yarn though, only the second or third thing I've spun on my spinning wheel, and I have to say it's very springy.

What I'm reading: 

Knitting Workshop by Elizabeth Zimmermann

The Rose Garden by Susanna Kearsley

Wool, Wool 2 and Wool 3 by Hugh Howey

Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

I have to pause between the Howey books, which are really short stories, because my mind gets blown and I have to think for a few days or week. I also read The Plagiarist by Howey, which was another really great, blow your mind story.

We will have a weekend of wake and funeral and then go on through what has been a really mild winter so far. Today  it is icy and windy and cold and snowy, but up to today it's been cruising between the mid-40s to up to 74 degrees the other day. The old ones used to say when you have a black Christmas (meaning now snow) you will have a lot of deaths in the coming year. I hope that's not true.