Blanket-Maker: How I Used the Pandemic to Free My Mother’s Spirit

At the beginning of this pandemic friends were telling me that they thought we’d “be holed up for weeks! Maybe even a couple of months! “ I suggested it would be a year or more. They scoffed. I planned.

What to do with the year ahead? As an RP (retired person) I had the luxury of choosing whatever nagging project that I had been putting off for my 40-plus years of gainful employment. What project would make me feel the most relief? The answer dropped in front of me like an anvil in an old cartoon: Finish Mom’s Quilts.

Mom’s been gone for fifteen years, and those quilt tops were sitting in a big bin marked, OCD-ly enough, “Mom’s unfinished Quilts.” We gave away over half of her fabric stash when she died, and I was left with a couple of totes of 1990’s fabric and eight quilts in various stages of “doneness.” Some were all finished, just needing the backing and to be quilted. Some were just hundreds of teeny, tiny geometrical scraps of cloth — with one square completed to give me a hint. Yes, this was a project worthy of a global pandemic. I looked heavenward. “Okay, Mom. Here we go.”

I pulled them out and looked at the task. Seeing them all spread out in my sewing room, I decided to ease my way in and start with the ones almost done. I worked my way back to the ones that were in pieces and for which I’d have to make the squares myself. Low-hanging fruit through major brain teasers, I set my course.

Two or three days a week, week after week, month after quarantine month, I made my way through my mother’s work, finishing each as I thought best. Sashing here. Borders there. Choosing backing for this one, binding for that one. I learned to hand stitch the bindings. Sewed squares in upside down and inside out, ripped the stitching out and did it again, right.

And as I sewed each one — its own little piece of my mother’s life — I talked to her. What I loved about her. What was hard. What I wished we’d had for a relationship, what I treasured in what we did have in a relationship. I asked what she thought of the fabric. Asked her to help me find more so I could finish the squares. (And suddenly there it was!! All cut out!) Told her all the ways she was my hero, and all the ways I admired how she had managed to raise five obstreperous kids and work full time. We laughed about the years Dad lived with me after she “crossed over.” I owned that I had a lot more sympathy, and congratulated her on her patience in spending almost sixty years with the guy. We talked about how happy she was in Oshkosh, where she started quilting. And how hard it was for her those last few years. When I was about six quilts in, I was reading Anatomy of the Spirit, by Caroline Myss. In describing one of her earliest teachers, she writes this:

…I was in the presence of a good teacher, and a good teacher brings me to attention instantly.

Rachel told me that she was half Russian and half Athabascan and had lived in Alaska long before it became a state. As she shared, albeit briefly, her background and Athabascan spiritual traditions with me, she changed my life forever.

“See that blanket on the wall? That blanket is very special. In the Athabascan culture, being a blanket-maker or a songwriter or having any occupation is a matter of great honor. You have to have permission from a songwriter to sing his songs because his songs contain his spirit. And when you are a blanket-maker, you are forbidden to begin weaving a blanket unless you know you will live long enough to finish it. If you find out that you need to die” — mind you she said “need to die” — “you must perform a ceremony with someone who will agree to finish the task for you, because you cannot leave one part of your work unfinished before you die. Otherwise, you leave a part of your spirit behind.

“That blanket was almost finished, when the Great Spirit came in a dream to the woman who was making it and told her to prepare to leave the earth. She asked the Spirit if she could live long enough to finish the blanket, and the Spirit said yes, she would be given that much more time. She died two days after finishing that blanket. Her spirit is in that blanket in a good and powerful way, and it gives me strength.”

I put the book down and cried. I understood. My mother’s spirit was in those quilts in a good and powerful way. I was spending this “time out of time” in the surreal deserted world of COVID-19 freeing my mother’s spirit! I had chosen the right task, but I hadn’t known why.

I have now finished seven of the eight. I’m in the process of binding number seven, and will bring them home to New York when I travel there this summer, to give them to family members who loved my mom. Her spirit will be free, and will be present “in a good and powerful way” for each one who has a quilt. And mine will be free, too, in a way I could never have dreamed.

Blessings, Mom.

Happy Mother’s Day, 2021.

Originally published at http://katebracy.wordpress.com on May 8, 2021.