My Mother's Unfinished Knitting
Half a sweater on two needles, paused mid-row like her sentence.
There is half a sweater in my hallway cupboard that outranks me in the family hierarchy.
It sits in a cloth bag printed with sunflowers, wine-colored wool still attached to two bamboo needles, a row stopped exactly in the middle. Thirty-one stitches done, thirty-two waiting. My mother put it down on a Thursday evening to answer the phone, and she never picked it up again, because the stroke came on Saturday, and by Sunday the doctors were using the word "comfortable," which is the least comfortable word in the English language.
For a year I could not touch the bag. I dusted around it. I once moved the entire cupboard rather than move the bag inside it, which my back has not forgiven me for.
My mother was a mid-row pauser.
This is important. Some knitters finish the row before they get up, the way some people finish their sentence before they let you speak. Not her. She paused mid-row, mid-song, mid-argument, always certain she would be right back, and the maddening thing is that she always was. She would stop halfway through telling me why my cousin's marriage was doomed, disappear to rescue something on the stove, and return twenty minutes later with "and THAT is why the boy's mother is at fault," as if no time had passed at all.
She paused mid-row the way she paused mid-sentence, certain she would be right back.
The unfinished projects of the dead are not tasks. That is what nobody understands when they gently suggest you "sort through her things." A task is something waiting to be completed. These are sentences waiting to be continued, in a voice that no longer exists.
Her recipe notebook stops in the middle of a pickle recipe, at "now for the most important step." Her library book still has the bus ticket in it, marking page 174. The sweater is thirty-one stitches into row two hundred and something. My mother did not end... She paused.
Two winters after she died, I decided to finish the sweater.
I want to say the decision was profound. It was not. It was February, I had the flu, and the internet had shown me a video of a man knitting a sock, and I sat up at two in the morning with a fever and thought, with total conviction: I will finish Ma's sweater. Fevers are like that.
The flu passed... The conviction, weirdly, did not.
I could not knit. My mother had tried to teach me at nine years old and had given up with the diplomatic assessment that my hands were "better suited to other things," which we both knew meant nothing. So I learned from videos, and then, when the videos were not enough, from the Tuesday knitting circle at the local library, where the average age was seventy and the average mercy was zero.
"Your tension is a tragedy," Mrs. D'Souza told me in week two, holding up my practice square, which curled like a stale sandwich. "Who hurt you?"
"My mother died," I said, which was unfair as an answer to a knitting question, but the room did not flinch. Half of them, it turned out, had joined this circle carrying somebody's unfinished wool. The bag of the dead, Mrs. D'Souza called it. Every knitting circle in the world has one member working through a bag of the dead.
It took me four months of practice squares before they let me near the actual sweater. Mrs. D'Souza examined my mother's stitches through her bifocals like a jeweler and said, "She knitted loose. Relaxed hands. You knit like you are strangling a debt collector. Everyone will see the line where she stopped and you started."
"Can I fix that?"
"No," she said, and went back to her own work... Then, without looking up: "You should not want to."
So I began. Thirty-two stitches into row two hundred and something, my hands where her hands had been, the bamboo needles still holding, I swear this, the faint smell of her: Pond's cold cream and cardamom. The first row took me forty minutes. I cried through eleven of them, which for my family is practically a festival of open emotion.
The pattern was folded inside the sunflower bag, a photocopy from some 1980s magazine, soft as cloth from handling. And in the margin, in her handwriting, in the blue pen she kept in her blouse drawer, were measurements.
Chest. Sleeve. Shoulder to hip.
They were mine.
I had assumed, the whole time, the sweater was for my father, or for herself, or for the general purposes of wool. It had not once occurred to me that I was thirty-one stitches from the middle of a sentence addressed to me. She had measured a cardigan I owned, I realized. She must have done it secretly, on some visit, with the measuring tape she kept in her purse for judging furniture in other people's homes.
The sweater was my next birthday. She died in March... My birthday is in June.
I put the knitting down and did not pick it up for three weeks.
What brought me back, of all things, was a writing prompt. I had signed up for a mailing list in my bad months, the way grieving people sign up for everything, and one morning it sent me a prompt: write about an object you cannot throw away. I wrote about the bag of the dead for two hours without stopping. Somewhere in that writing I found the sentence I had been avoiding, which was not "she is gone." I had accepted that she was gone. The sentence was: "she was still making things for me when she left." That is a different wound. That is love with the tag still on it.
I finished the sweater in October.
Here is what you should know: three rows below where my mother stopped, there is a mistake. A slipped stitch, a small hole, the kind of error the knitting circle taught me to spot. She was two hundred rows into this sweater. She was forty years into knitting... She absolutely knew it was there.
She kept going anyway.
I sat with that for a long time, in the library, on a Tuesday. My mother, who redid my school braids if one hair rebelled, who returned a wedding sari over a thread, had looked at an imperfection three rows deep, decided that unraveling it would cost more than it was worth, and carried on. Whatever she knew at the end of her life about perfection, she knew it in her hands first.
So I left the hole. I left everything. When you hold the finished sweater to the light you can see the exact row where she stopped and I began, her loose easy stitches and then my anxious tight ones, a visible tide line straight across the chest, like a water mark on a wall showing how high the flood came.
The line sits directly over my heart when I wear it. That is either a coincidence of arithmetic or the entire point, and I have stopped needing to know which.
I wear it every winter, first cold day, no exceptions. My aunt says wine red is not my color. She is right. It was never going to be my color. It was her color for me, chosen in a shop I will never know, on a sale I will never know, for a birthday she did not attend, and our whole shared life, all that stubborn wool-wrapped family devotion, is knitted into it right up to row two hundred and something.
The needles are back in the sunflower bag, in the hallway cupboard, holding nothing now.
I am keeping them. Somebody will finish my sentence one day.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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