Knitting and Death
I spent a week in the hospital with my dad before he died. This is what I learned there about the intersection of knitting and death.
In January 2024, my dad was diagnosed with cancer. Although doctors said it was aggressive and tests showed the same, he made it through nearly the entire year without showing obvious signs of sickness. Then he took a turn for the worse and was admitted to the hospital at Christmas.
I arrived from abroad at about 8 p.m. on a Saturday. It seemed to me that the whole building exuded exhaustion. This impression was possibly a reflection of my own physical state; the fact that I’d been traveling for half a day undoubtedly coloured my perception. Crossing the threshold, I knew at once that I had entered an Institution with a capital I. It was the same feeling that I used to get as a child in the 1990s upon entering schools built in the 1960s and 70s. Here, some modernization had clearly taken place, but the fundamental architectural ideas from more than half a century ago of What a Hospital Should Look Like could not quite be disguised. This was exacerbated by the fact that budget cuts had neglected to provide for basic maintenance and a general look of shabbiness pervaded the place.
The hospital foyer was mostly empty; visiting time had long since ended. Mom explained that we were allowed in at this late hour only because we were family. The food court stalls near the entrance had all been shuttered and the windows of the adjoining pharmacy were dark. Fluorescent hallway lights and coloured arrows on the floor directed us to the elevators.
When I first saw him, Dad was lying on the bed under a light blue cotton blanket. It was a loose plain weave, almost but not quite rough to the touch, and surprisingly warm. In the following days, I noticed a small hole near one of the bottom corners and somewhat absurdly it occurred to me how easily I could darn it. Not only the blanket was blue; I saw that pale shade everywhere, from the gown to the non-slip slippers to the privacy curtains that divided the double room. On that note, I think the room had originally been a single, and its layout affected its subsequent conversion to a double: only one person got the benefit of the window. That person wasn’t my dad.
More fluorescent lights lit the scene with their characteristic harshness. Although the entrance hallway downstairs had been redolent with prints by Cree and Ojibwa artists, here no pictures enlivened the beige walls. Instead an analog clock, thankfully silent, kept track of the passing minutes. Below it, a dry-erase board informed us of his nurse’s name and encouraged the patient to write down what “My goal for today is:”. Dad never wrote down any goals; I did, but only in my head, starting with “Don’t die.”
I couldn’t see how such a place promoted healing. If my soul—housed within the body of a person who is, as far as I know, healthy—withered and recoiled upon entering this environment, what would happen to a sick person’s? (This article wasn’t supposed to be a rant on medical architecture, but here’s a link to the article that first made me aware of this topic.) Indeed, Dad wanted desperately to leave. In the end, though, the severity of his condition made it impossible for him to come home or to be transferred to hospice. Instead we had to bring home to him.
Handknitted objects became an important part of these efforts, at least on my part. In particular, a blanket made of sock yarn scraps played a major role in how I perceived the environment. I was actually extremely surprised by how profoundly the blanket’s bright colours and the personal intentions behind its creation mitigated the emotional sterility of the hospital furnishings.
Since 2018, all my sock yarn scraps have gone towards this project. By the time that I left Oslo at the end of December 2024, I had about 200 squares. I started piecing them together at the airport. This proved more challenging than I had expected. Suffice it to say that it was slow going. I spent most of my two flights sweating under the ever-increasing woolly expanse but eleven hours later, it was a lot smaller than I thought it should have been.
I tried to continue piecing at my parent’s apartment and then later at the hospital, but made little progress. Sewing does not come naturally to me and I couldn’t really focus on it. Nevertheless, even in its truncated state, the blanket proved large enough to cover Dad’s feet, which was a boon in the sense that his feet were often cold. And as soon as the blanket was on the bed, I felt different. Better. Relieved. Suddenly, the room contained an object imbued with personal and emotional value. The crooked stitching, over which I’d despaired on the plane, now seemed like a feature rather than a bug. Its colourful patchwork over the foot of the bed embodied both our presence and our love.
To be frank, I do not know that Dad ever knew about the existence of the blanket. By the time that I decided that further attempts at sewing were futile and that I’d just bring him what I had, he had begun lapsing into extended periods of unconsciousness. Sometimes in his sleep he kicked off the blanket.
He also had a pair of socks that I’d given him in September. They alone, among all the pairs I’d made for him over the years, lacked holes—the heels of all the other pairs had long since worn through. They also stretched enough to accommodate his feet and ankles swollen by edema. Like every other textile in the hospital, these socks were blue. Darker than the medical shade and with some visual interest provided by the variegated denim dye pattern, but blue nonetheless. I had knitted them according to a British Red Cross pattern for soldiers’ socks from World War I; in retrospect, this is a cruel irony given that we knew from the outset that Dad would never win “the battle with cancer.”
Despite my ambivalence about their colour, these socks played an important role in humanizing my experience of the hospital. That place reminded me of a prison: patients were subjected to rigid check-up schedules, ate what they were given when they were served it, and wore those pale blue tunics that might as well have been prison stripes. I don’t discount the necessity of these things for patient health and the smooth running of the hospital, but I also felt that they also stripped away Dad’s humanity. To see him wearing just one piece of handmade clothing made a difference. A small one, to be sure, and not a particularly visible one—many times I wished that these socks were red or orange or some garish stripe combination or that I’d knitted them with colourwork or cables—but they nevertheless reassured me of his individuality.
There are limits, though, to the power of craft. Knitting did not diminish my preoccupation around the absence of natural materials and natural light in the hospital, both of which I felt divorced us from the rest of the world at the end of Dad’s life. The hospital ward felt like a place entirely separate from the outside, and a small patch of blanket and a pair of socks couldn’t do much to bridge the gap. Sock yarn isn’t spun from rays of sunshine, no matter what indie dyers name their colourways. And so, surrounded by plastic tubes and IV bags, nestled in the frame of a plastic bed, illuminated by fluorescent light, and confined to the windowless walls of that room, death too became unnatural and unreal. Dad died there, but did he die in the real world?
The answer, of course, is yes, and it is once again craft that brings this knowledge home to me. Afterwards, Mom and I sorted through Dad’s clothes. The pieces that I’d made for him evidenced my evolution as a designer. We traced this path backwards through a series of vests knitted over the past 15 years to half a dozen scarves (their production spanning more than two decades), and concluding with the infamous “Marge hat”—so called in the family because, in all its blue cabled Lopi glory, it sat a little too high and a little too stiffly on the head of whoever was brave enough (or unfortunate enough) to wear it, lending that person an uncanny resemblance to Marge Simpson with her blue beehive. Yet Dad donned it every winter.
He was also one of the three people for whom I knit socks, and in his sock drawer were two pairs that I’d made, their heels turned to holes.
“Do you want them?” Mom asked.
“Why?” I replied. What would I do with these socks? Who would wear them if I darned their heels? At the same time, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that it would be wrong to consign them to the trash without at least a second thought. In the end, I put them into my suitcase and brought them back to Oslo—if I were taking anything, I’d rather have the socks than the Marge hat.
I knit for very few people, and giving away something that I’ve knitted always feels to me like giving a woolly hug. It’s a part of myself, sent halfway around the world to warm and comfort and to remind the recipient that they are loved. I hadn’t expected, upon reclaiming these socks from Dad, that the opposite would be true: that it would feel like a piece of him. In retrospect, why shouldn’t this be the case? He wore them, he treasured them, he saved them hoping that I’d eventually master the art of darning and make them wearable again. So doing, he imbued them with a bit of himself.
Dad won’t wear these socks again, but I can—in a manner of speaking. By the time that I returned home, I’d decided what to do: unravel them, salvage the knittable lengths of yarn, and reknit them into something else. Yesterday, I began unwinding the yarn. In less than an hour, the socks that had existed for more than a decade disappeared.
Dad has gone from this world. But the Dale of Norway baby wool and the handdyed Peace Fleece merino will know another life. I will knit this yarn and think of him, and then I will wear those garments and remember him: the man who was my biggest fan—who always believed, against years of evidence to the contrary, that my knitting patterns would eventually make me rich. I don’t think he’ll ever be proven right on that note, but the thought, and his old socks, will keep me warm.