Begin Again

I wrote the first part of this piece about my mother on Sunday, Nov. 30, 2008 (the day after the first anniversary of her death). I wasn’t ready to post it then, but in honor of Mother’s Day 2010 I thought I’d share it.

Jane E. Lawton

It’s November 30, 2008.  A year and a day after my mother’s death, I find myself without much to do.

That isn’t really true. I have lots to do: Andy’s mother is coming to stay in two weeks, and the house must be made fit for grown-ups. I have books to read, projects to knit, people to call, writing to finish.

But the big thing I’ve been “supposed to do” in the last year — grieve my mother – is by some measurements gone. Yesterday was the first anniversary of her sudden and (to my mind) premature death.

Many of you have heard this before, but…Mom was 63, a vibrant woman who leapt into anything that caught her interest. She was in the Maryland State Legislature, held a full-time job in government besides that, climbed mountains, held countless parties, made friends at the drop of a hat, wrote poetry, and taught me to embroider and crochet when I was little.

Before you ask — she didn’t really knit. No one’s perfect. [Read about her knitting efforts after the jump!]

Funnily enough, she did try to knit, just before she died.  I had met Danielle recently, and to support Knit-A-Gogo (and have some fun!) Mom and I hosted a knitting party in my new house. Danielle and Karida (of Neighborhood Fiber Co.) taught a beginner group and an intermediate group.  Mom was in the beginner group, and I was in the intermediate.  I wish now that I had spent more time with her that day.  When I think about that, though, I remind myself that we were both busy – she was entertaining her friends, and I was entertaining mine.

Anyway, Mom left with several rows on the needles, a beginner scrap that she kept talking about when I’d call her.  “I’m knitting,” she’d say, “when I have a moment before I go to sleep at night.” I’d say, “Mom, you don’t have to like knitting just because I do,” and she’d say, “the knitting is right next to my bed,” in a reassuring voice. On the day she died, when I went up to her bedroom to find the clothes in which she would be buried, I also looked for the knitting.  Sure enough, there was a little beginner square on the needles, right next to the bed.  I have it still, two and a half years later.  I don’t know what to do with it, but it’s precious to me.

Why? In part, it’s about how she jumped into my life as I jumped into adulthood.  I went to college — she came to visit and exclaimed about getting to know the area around Philadelphia.  I started taking my writing more seriously — she pulled out the poetry she’d written most of her life and went to a class at The Writer’s Center.  I went to England for a semester abroad and promptly got horribly homesick — she came to see me and walked me all over the city of Oxford, pointing out places I could go for coffee to write and gardens I could walk in when I was feeling lonely.

I could go on, but you get the idea.  She used to tell me that she thought my sister and I “broadened her life,” because she would learn about the things we enjoyed and the places we lived.  I think it takes a special person to see the different stages in a child’s life that way — not as an ending, a gradual pulling-away, but as a new opportunity. And when she realized how important knitting was becoming to me, she tried it out, too.

These days, I remember other ways she supported my knitting, long ago.  She taught me to crochet when I was very young. I know I was doing it pretty obsessively when I was 9.  Before that it was embroidery, before that friendship bracelets or lanyards or those ribbon-covered barrettes.  The barrettes came about because we saw them at a store, and Mom tilted her head to the side and said, “We can make that.” She used to say that a lot, when I was little. Only about half the time were we actually able to make whatever it was, but she said it all the time.  Barbie clothes, painted boxes, shoes with beads on them…we can make that.

Mom’s mother lived to be 96, and we fully expected Mom to do the same. No one thought about the fact that Mom’s father died at 63 as well, when Mom was 24. So I was unprepared for her death, but from watching Mom with her own mother I knew that no one is ever really prepared.

She was giving a speech downtown. She’d been nervous about the speech — people have since told me that she did very well. Shortly after sitting down, she collapsed. She died very quickly, they told us at the hospital. She had a common heart defect — mitrovalve prolapse — that doesn’t usually cause sudden death. This time, the coroner told us later, it did. I found it in me to be glad she had died quickly. I found it in me to get through the memorial service, the funeral, the first day back at work, the days and weeks that followed.

For a while after she died I couldn’t knit. That’s not accurate — I wasn’t knitting. I didn’t feel right doing anything, and that included knitting. I didn’t want to think about the knitting party or any of the other opportunities I’d had to spend time with her that I’d squandered.

Then Danielle and Karida found out that I wasn’t knitting.  They were having none of that.  Karida asked me to test-knit something for her, and for Mother’s Day 2008 Danielle hired me to teach during her Mother’s Day workshop.  These two women brought me back to knitting and encouraged me to make it more central in my life. These little gestures probably meant very little to them, but they were so important to me.

A few hours after Mom died, as the relatives started to arrive from Oklahoma and the friends started to pack the house, I told myself that every hug I received from a woman was really a hug from Mom.  That helped me accept their love, their comfort.  Similarly, little gestures of love I received from women all over — some who knew my mother had died and some who didn’t — seemed to me to be sent by her.  Danielle’s and Karida’s gestures were two of those, reminders that I would be taken care of.

So I made a beginning on a different phase of my life – one without a mother, one with a lot of different knitting adventures. I started teaching knitting. I pitched a couple of patterns to Karida for her book. I tried to put some good out into the world in honor of Mom, in different ways.  I tried to focus on what was good in life, as she had.  I tried to focus on the ways I felt taken care of, as some friends who had lost parents told me to do. I looked at the little square of knitting she’d made and thanked her, hard, for all the ways she supported me and inspired me, and especially for telling me I could make anything.

There’s so much more to say about Jane Lawton. This is just a beginning. But today, this moment, what’s most important is the possibility she left behind: We can make that.