The Scarf of Healing
Right before I left for the hospital in early December I decided it was a perfect time to learn a new hobby, and that it should be knitting.
This decision came from a few different places. The looming indefinite hospitalization was certainly among them. From that stemmed a desire to find something new and exciting yet soothing to keep my hands and mind busy. There was also the motivating factor of having both an abundance of yarn and needles despite having no skills to use them with.
How and where may an abundance of both come from if I didn’t know how to knit, one may ask (unless you have found yourself in a similar situation before). The answer would reveal another underlying reason I’d decided to take it up at this particular moment in time.
While I was just beginning to navigate my epilepsy my grandparents were both becoming increasingly sick. They had both meant a lot to me, especially in my early childhood. I lived with them or just down the road for many years; they were one of my first concepts of safety.
Over time my relationship with my entire family has become. . . more and more complicated. The last time I remember seeing everyone was actually to visit them. It was also when I got the needles and yarn as my family and I were sorting through their possessions to either bring to their new home or sell. That was years ago now, I think.
Both my Grandparents passed away in rapid succession before I had the chance to. . . I don’t know, say goodbye? Thank you? Quickly bridge an infinite gap to finally be able to come to some sort of mutual understanding?
Regardless, that’s been a complicated layer of the overall experience of coming to terms with my epilepsy and now FND diagnosis: attempting to simultaneously unpack the complex grief and guilt. I didn’t attend a funeral that I wasn’t invited to. Looking back, I’m not sure how I would’ve handled something like that in the state I was. At the time I was being mentally pummeled by my seizures near-daily to the point of having very little grasp on day to day events, and instead feeling frozen in my own body and living in flashbacks.
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It had already been in the back of my mind (and front, at night when the insomnia set in) since they passed how heavy the grief was. As my time in the epilepsy monitoring unit got closer, I began to see learning how to knit as perfect for all those initial reasons. It wasn’t until I began really hitting a groove and the rhythmic tapping transported me back to Grandparents living room that I saw my own hidden motivations. So many memories slowly unlocked as I continued working; I felt able to hold things I’d been running from before.
I learned the basics and got my scarf established before I left for the hospital. Having something to do that wasn’t obsess over my upcoming EMU stay was so welcome. I’d come up with tons of stuff to do in the hospital - it’s literally the title of my last post! Not gonna lie, I almost exclusively scarfed it up. It was fun to have the nurses, techs and rest of my neuro team remark on the progress I’d made. Being bedridden while also closely monitored isn’t exactly an empowering experience. Having this physical progress marker, getting to learn something new and seeing myself improving in real time, anchored me. Not to mention finally beginning to really process a grief that had felt trapped in me since my Grandparents health started declining.
Now the scarf feels like it has an aura about it. Maybe that’s just in my mind, but at least to me it stands for so much now. Somewhere along the way I began referring to it as “the scarf of healing” and it truly feels that way. Like a D&D item, or something.
I just hit the halfway point on Christmas and had a flood of emotions. I’m sort of afraid to be done with it and no longer have the same way to immerse myself in my connection with my Grandparents.
But isn’t that just the experience of grief in general? When I’m done actively making the scarf, I’ll move into the stage of life where I wear it around everywhere instead. I begin to live in the time of reminiscing, of telling people I knit it with the needles and yarn I inherited from my grandma while healing myself and my mind. The scarf will forever keep alive a dialogue about how much my Grandparents mean to me, and not just meant.
It's forever a symbol of how complex living, healing and dying all are, and how our threads pull on each other as our narratives our woven together at different points in our journeys.