Thank you all for your continued comments and stories of Rusty. Please feel free to add more there or here, I’d love to hear them.

He was moved to the VA Hospice in Dayton yesterday; he’s on the 9th floor there and Aunt Gay says he has a lovely view, even though he’s not able to appreciate it. His pain is so bad now that they’re keeping him medicated. The good side of that is that he’s not in pain with so much medication. The flip side of that is that he is too medicated to be able to eat or drink. It could be just a matter of days. But then again, if they get it regulated, he may have weeks. He has indicated he’d love company, so if you are near the Dayton area and have a love for Rusty Hevelin, you should swing by.

I’ve always been one that values quality over quantity of life, and one who values my loved ones not being in pain more than I value them being in pain and in my life. I believe the end is a time to show that you have taken to heart the lessons learned and love gained from the person leaving. Yes, there is heart-crushing loss, grief, fear of how much missing them is going to hurt. But I also feel that your individual pain or regrets shouldn’t be keeping someone here if it’s their time to go. I hope, whenever I lose someone (and it seems unfair that I’ve lost so many) that I have spent every day telling them, showing them, that I love them, and that they know that I know they love me as well. That they don’t feel they have to stay around to tell me something. That they can rest knowing that I will miss them but that the gift of having them at all will eventually see me through mourning. That there is joy on the other side; laughter, memories, photographs, stories, healing. That because we carry them in our hearts, in our actions, they never really leave us.

I think that’s a sign. An allegory, if you will. Even in the darkest part of the year, the coldest part (of course, as I say that it’s already over 60 degrees this morning and all the windows and the screen door to the porch are open), the part of the year where most things fold up and hibernate, life goes on.

Oh, hello, major family health crisis with the chance of death for Christmas, you feel familiar. I would like to punch you in your face. Your stupid, stupid face.

Ten years ago tomorrow, on Christmas Eve day in 2001, we made the decision to move Daddy from the hospital to Hospice. A bed there had opened up, and he wasn’t coming out of the coma they’d induced so that he could have a better chance with his thin, wasted body to maybe survive this round of chemotherapy. He wasn’t going to get better; this was a one-way trip. We had debated for a couple of days about what to do for Christmas. Do we still have it at my house, where it was being held then? Do we move it to Barbara’s apartment, to make it easy for her? Do we have at at Aunt Gay and Uncle Joe’s, where we were going to eat anyway, to make it easier for them to cook? Do we not have it at all? We opted to go on as usual, Christmas at my house where everything already was, and while it was weird to not have Daddy there, at least there was some semblance at trying to be normal.

Christmas Day 2009 Jeff and I drove to the VA to hang out with Uncle Joe for a while. We didn’t open any presents that day; we knew Uncle Joe was going to make it by then (after all, he’d made it that far, right? Surely the Universe wouldn’t fuck with us that much) so as a family we opted to hold off on Christmas celebrations until Uncle Joe was back out of the hospital again. My mom and Dave came up for Christmas that year, and they all went to see Uncle Joe in the morning, and Jeff and I went to see Uncle Joe in the afternoon. I honestly don’t remember what Tim did that day. I think he stayed home and read computer books (like ya do).

And now we have Christmas 2011.

Here’s the Readers Digest Condensed Version, which I have hinted at a little here but haven’t written down the whole thing, because for most of the year I thought there was something wrong with my blog and I didn’t want to write a lot of long, heart-felt posts just to have them disappear, but here we go now because (1) I hope those things are fixed and (2) I need to talk. In 500 words or less: Early this year, Rusty fell in his kitchen, and was on the floor for four days before someone found him. He spent months in the hospital and rehab center. He was finally pronounced well enough to be able to continue to live alone, and sent home, where he was for approximately a week when… something fuzzy happened. Either he slept on the floor on purpose, or he fell again and didn’t want to come clean about it, but they had to break in and get him up again and he’s been back in the hospital and rehab center since then. We had made the decision to bring him down here into a nursing home, but apparently his worn-out body has decided it has had enough, and is beginning the shut-down process. His mind, other than befuddled by morphine for the pain, is sharp as a tack. But his body is done.

Earlier this week (fuck, just yesterday, so not so much “earlier”) there were decisions that were made, and then made differently, involving an amputation (final verdict: don’t do the amputation, it wouldn’t solve anything and would just be a horrible experience for Rusty); Aunt Gay is up there and is really shouldering a lot of the burdens of choices and decisions, and I’m sure your thoughts would really mean a lot to her. She reads this blog, so feel free to leave her some words of love in the comments. And tell Uncle Joe that it’s OK if he wants to go to Dayton next week, that my mom and Dave and Barbara and Sharon and Chris and Laura and Gerry and Jag and Antony and Tim and I can totally handle the New Years Eve party (as long as they don’t mind if it’s still at their house, because dudes, people would show up there regardless).

What do I think…? I love Rusty. He is a rapscallion, and a tease, and gives a good back or foot rub, and he reminds me of a dinner roll because he’s hard and crusty on the outside and soft and gooey on the inside. He’s pragmatic, and practical, and is a “show, not tell” kind of guy. I don’t think he’s ever told me he loves me; but he shows up, and isn’t that what love is? He doesn’t need to say the words because he shows you all the time. He’s been to every Christmas, Thanksgiving when we still celebrated it, birthdays when Aunt Gay and I used to have joint parties at Tarrytown or Merritt Island, random month-long visits, both of my weddings, my fathers death, Uncle Joe’s illness. He’s full of stories and I’ve gotten to hear a good portion of them. He’s Santa’s Evil Twin, he’s the Wise Old Man, he’s Gandalf and the Trickster and a librarian and a font of knowledge all rolled into one twinking-eye’d Old Man. He’s the best Grandfather a girl could choose to have.

And now it’s time to say goodbye. Thank you. I love you. You’ve meant so much to me. It’s time to celebrate and cultivate all the things in life I’ve learned from you, and practice them.

Would Rusty want me to mourn, or would Rusty want me to celebrate his life and pass on his stories and attitude? Yes, there will be mourning, there has to be. But I’m goddamn lucky to have had a Rusty in my life, and that joy deserves a nod as well.

Lest you think, though, that I’m without feeling, I’ll end this with something I wrote to Jag in an email the other night -
Also, pain is OK. I welcome pain. I’d never want to be without pain. Pain is a balance; without the pain of hurt and loss, we wouldn’t recognize the joy of bounty and love. If I don’t acknowledge pain upon losing someone, how can I acknowledge I have love for them? If you don’t feel a loss, how do you know there was anything there that you were holding special?

Ten years ago on the 17th he went into the hospital for the last time. On the 18th, his birthday, the rest of us went to the opening of The Fellowship of the Ring, and I thought it grossly unfair that this movie that he’d spent a year or more scouring the internet for photos, clips, teasers, spoilers, cast information, leaked behind-the-scenes photos… he’d never get to see it. He loved those books and passed that love onto me, and we’d spent the last year being excited and hoping Jackson would do it justice. Now it’s a decade later, and while I’m excited to see photos and stills and behind-the-scenes videos of The Hobbit, it’s just not the same.

A decade. That’s almost a quarter of my life. Part of me wants to shake my fist at the sky and call shenanigans for whatever forces of the universe conspired to make my daddy leave the party too early. But part of me wants to thank my daddy for doing such a good job of raising me to be a complete person, one who can get along and still function after he’s gone. He didn’t leave me with unanswered questions. Well, other than “how come at 40 my dad seemed to know everything, and at 40, I don’t seem to know shit?!”… maybe he didn’t know shit, either, but he sure did talk a good game. And of course he had help in raising me, what with Bill and Doris and G-ma and Papa and Aunt Gay and Uncle Joe and Rusty.

The first ten years of my life he was DADDY. The man who tells stories and helps me get dressed in the mornings and takes off bandaids and takes care of my chicken pox and makes all the bad things go away. The second ten years of my life he was UGH, MY DAD, with the long hair and the crazy wife and really, buying a farm in the middle of nowhere, what the hell. The third ten years of my life he was MY DAD THE MAN, and I got to know him as a person and as a man filled with self-doubt and humor and love and bruises and he was as simple and complex as we all are. I got to know his dreams and his regrets and his confusion. And then he was gone.

I used to wonder, when it first happened, was it worse to lose a parent when they’re still in that stage of being able to do no wrong? Or worse when you’ve then gotten to know them as a person? Or worse when you have to watch them wither away at the end, when you’re old too and can feel that finger moving on to you…? Having met people who have lost parents at all three stages, now, I don’t think any one of them is worse than the other. It all sucks. And people who tell you it gets better are lying lying liars. It doesn’t get better. You just get numb to it. That’s not better, it’s just marginally easier to carry.

One time I surprised daddy by coming home for a science fiction convention, that year I lived up North with Quinn. I casually walked into the house – you could see the kitchen from the front door – and since I could see him there, I shouted out, “what’s for dinner!?”. He was halfway into telling me what was for dinner when it registered who he was talking to, and he came running over to wrap me in a big bear hug. “My daughter! My baby girl!” At the time I was like, jeez, dad. Now that I am friend with parents whose kids are leaving the nest, I understand more of the joy he must have felt at my surprise visit. I can still feel that hug in my mind. I’d give a heck of a lot to feel it in person again.

By the way, Uncle Joe wrote something about daddy yesterday as well. You should read it.

Yesterday was busy (wait, who’s surprised?!). I got yarn died, yarn rewound, orders processed, bisque glazed, errands run, friends hung with, a wee bit of yarn spun, items listed, Chex Mix bagged, cats and dogs paid attention to, laundry done (but not folded), and dinner eaten.

I’m tired again just reading that!

Speaking of working hard, and being tired… I may need to take some time off in the next couple weeks. Well, “off.” Meaning I still work but just don’t talk about it every minute of the day, and don’t list new items for a couple of weeks. Rusty, old family friend and grandfather stand-in, has had a long year of health problems. The end result is that next week he’ll be moving into a nursing home here in town. I’ve already been there and taken a tour, and while I’m sure I’ll feel some guilt about him being there, it won’t be guilt about the place being skeevy — it’s actually very well-kept and I got a good vibe from it. I’d be happy to go into that later, in a different post. Suffice to say that I went in expecting the place to be some sort of 18th-century sanitarium of which horror movies are made, and came out thinking that it was more like a luxury hotel. Anyway, my point was that even though I’m sure Aunt Gay will try to shoulder all the work (gee, I wonder where I get it from…) I want to be able to free up the next couple of weeks to the point where if I have to drop everything one day, or two days, that nothing will suffer.

So I’ll continue to work on current custom orders, but would appreciate if anyone wants anything specific that they hold off on talking to me about that from the 20th to about January 3rd (Timmy’s birthday!). And I’ll leave the shop open, selling things and shipping, but I won’t be restocking or adding in any new items until January. In addition to giving me time for my family, and time for the holidays, this will give me a spot of time to do inventory and evaluate how some things are selling, and think about what I want for 2012 (like an online shop of my own).

Here’s a picture of me and Rusty from a New Years (I can tell because of my pretty yellow dress) at my grandparents house in Merritt Island… maybe around… oh, I’d say between 1979 and 1981. That’s the hairstyle I had when I was about nine/ten, so… let’s call it 1980, then.

OK! This coffee cup isn’t going to refill itself, and those dye pots aren’t going to turn themselves on. Off to work, hi-ho, hi-ho!

PS. Before I forget, my mom is awesome! We got a box of candied nuts, cookies, and two kinds of marmalade yesterday, all home-made by my mommy. You may commence being jealous.

(You know I had to do this photo; I always have to do this photo. It’s my favorite!)

The fact that I used to fall asleep to this story when I was a toddler might explain a *lot* about me. I highly recommend it to both frighten and enchant your children.

Up on the watershed, standing at the fork in the road
You can stand there and agonize
Till your agony’s your heaviest load.

The more response I get to HaldeCraft, the less I want to work on Hanks… and then the more Hanks suffers (and the less I want to work on it). I mean, when we closed the bricks and mortar shop a year ago, Sharon said she was going to take care of the web store stuff, so I leave that to her and try hard to keep myself out of it. But I still think the blog, the twitter, and the Ravelry group need to be taken care of, so I do what I can there. Except nobody ever comments on the blog, which makes me feel my time there is wasted– so I basically have said “fuck it” to the Hanks blog. My time needs to be spent on that which rewards me somehow. Twitter is slightly less unresponsive, especially in the last few weeks as I’ve tried to make more of an effort. And by starting a weekly “what are you working on” topic on Ravelry, I’ve been able to get some great chatter going there — including a few voices from whom I haven’t heard in months. But that takes time. Time I could be spending on HaldeCraft, which gets me easily five times the feedback. Imagine if I took the time I spend on HaldeCraft and applied it to Hanks — or visa versa? How much interested could I drum up in Hanks if I spent as much time marketing it online as I do HaldeCraft? Or how much more soap could I wrap if I wasn’t dyeing and winding yarn? Only, don’t actually say that, because voicing that makes me feel traitorous to my little yarn shop. And in spite of the massive debt I do have and the savings I no longer have because of Hanks, I did get a lot of good things out of it (even though that sentence doesn’t make it seem that way). Friends. A lot of knitting skills. Direction. A better sense of business ownership. The taste of working for myself. So I do have good things — so why am I feeling sad this week in relation to the yarn shop?

You’ll never fly as the crow flies, get used to a country mile.
When you’re learning to face the path at your pace
Every choice is worth your while.

And then I remembered what month it is. And I started thinking about anniversaries. One year ago now, we were starting to make whispers to each other about how Things Weren’t So Good. It’s the anniversary of some days wherein a lot of things got thought about pretty hard. In fact, one of my photos of the day, I took while thinking that at best we were going to have to move to a smaller location (I think that was the day were I  spent time drawing floor plans of both halves of the store in case the landlord would let us put the wall back up and only rent half the space)… but that more realistically we were going to have to close. And what was I going to do? At that point my husband – infinitely more skilled in the work department than I am – had been unemployed for nine months. What chance did I have of finding a job if he couldn’t? What savings we’d had left after putting money into starting Hanks were dwindling quickly; there was no way we had any more money we could put into the yarn store. Not without risking losing our house. I was sad and lonely and I couldn’t tell anyone what was on my mind because most of them were yarn store friends and I didn’t want them to feel guilty, or sorry for me, or worried, or whatever. I started bouncing ideas off Tim that week; thoughts about what else could I do, maybe something crafty, maybe something at home, maybe now was the time to start that ceramic studio I’d always wanted (remember this poll? I should have titled it SPOILER ALERT). I could do that at home without too much starting costs, thanks to my grandmother. So, anyway. A year ago this month I was scared and sad and lonely. Which apparently I didn’t let myself feel until THIS year.

Well there’s always retrospect to light a clearer path
Every five years or so I look back on my life
And I have a good laugh.

–Emily Saliers

Because I realized that what was really tugging at me in the last week or so was the anniversary of it. One year, it’s been, since the rug was pulled out from under my yarn store life and a fresh sturdy brick walkway of ceramics and soap was put in its place. I’m happy where I am – questioning some things, of course, but I think I always will. But I couldn’t let myself mourn the death of Hanks last year because I was too busy just trying to survive, trying to get through each day. So today I am sad, and maybe this time next year I’ll be less sad, and the year after that I won’t even think about it, and then five years will have passed and I’ll be a little reflective and look back on what I’ve done for the last little bit… and maybe question some more and evaluate, like ya do. And maybe there are some choices I have to make; maybe there are some more hard thoughts I need to think, and maybe I don’t want to think them — as if refusing to think about them makes them any less pushy?

ANYWAY. Anniversaries. Time for reflection, and maybe a tad too much introspection coupled with some navel gazing. HOLY SHIT 1167 WORDS IS ANYONE STILL READING THIS?!

Trouble
Oh trouble set me free
I have seen your face
And it’s too much too much for me

Grief and I? We’re like THIS [ imagine image of two fingers wrapped around each other ]. I can’t even count the number of family members I’ve lost any more. That’s what I guess, I suppose, for being the youngest, and not having any after me. I’m only ever going to LOSE people. I’m never going to GAIN a person (I’m not trying to dismiss Tim’s wonderful family, here; they’re all lovely — I’m just talking about my particular branch of the tree). And each time I lose someone; family, close family friend, friend of my own age… I try to carry them with me. I try to bring part of what I loved about them into my heart. From my Grandmother I got a love of poker and parties and crafting. From my father I got music and books and finding humor in the dark places. From Bill I got the patience to listen to people as they tell their stories, be they funny or sad or dull or exciting. By practicing what they’ve given me, they’re never really gone. Sometimes my heart is full to bursting with everything that I hold from my loved ones; as if all the things I’ve gotten from them could come busting out of my heart like a bomb, exploding bits of shrapnel composed of love and patience and talent and humor over everyone in front of me. But… sometimes my heart is heavy with hurting loss.

Trouble
Oh trouble can’t you see
You’re eating my heart away
And there’s nothing much left of me

I have this place in my sternum, and it sometimes hurts. The heart chakra, if you subscribe to that. I started noticing it after my dad died. I would be reading in bed, and my cat Buddha would come and stand on my chest, getting between me and my book. And she’d always stand RIGHT on my sternum and it ALWAYS hurt like a motherfucker. Like when I’m getting acupuncture from my friend Jenn and she pokes me in various places and says “is that tender” and I’m always like “no” until she hits me with a sledgehammer. A giant invisible sledgehammer that is disguised as her tiny finger (the HAMMER is her PINKY, hahahaha). She told me that right there, the sternum, that flat place of bone between your breasts, is where you store your grief. Well I must have some the size of an elephant, is all I could think. Two weeks ago at my massage appointment, my massage therapist was trying to undo some of the eternal tension in my shoulders and she started to press on that place in the sternum. “Would you happen to have any feelings you’re repressing?” she asked. To which I snorted. And chuckled. And tried not to burst into tears, although I’m sure she gets that a lot.

I’ve drunk your wine
You have made your world mine
So won’t you be fair
So won’t you be fair

The way I see it, there are three things I can do when someone I love dies. One: Move on, not really feeling anything about it either way. This is not an option for me, because, like Maya Angelou said about herself in her autobiography, I’m overly sensitive. Two: Move on, closing up my heart so I don’t go through THAT again. This isn’t really an option either; I love far too easily to be able to shut down — and really, without sadness to compare it to, how would we be able to judge when we are full of joy? Which brings me to number three: Move on, loving more, and appreciating love that much more for the knowledge that we are all of us, fleeting. Going out, as Maude said, and loving some more.

I don’t want no more of you
So won’t you be kind to me
Just let me go where
I have to go there

And the thing is… grief is there anyway, whether I ignore it or submerge in it. So I let myself feel it as much as I can. You might think I’d like it to just disappear, but I’m afraid that if it did, I might cherish people less. I might forget to tell friends I love them, I might be intentionally hurtful – or at least negligent of their feelings – becoming blind to the miracles that they are if I’m not aware of missing other people I once loved and laughed with just as often. One of my personal beliefs is that without seeing the bad, we wouldn’t know to recognize the good; so if we don’t feel the loss of some, how can we appreciate the gifts we still have in others? I don’t look at it as thinking my friends all might die at any moment; I look at it more like wanting them to know that I love them, and not being complacent about maybe being nicer to them next time I see them. Being nice to them *now*. Because *now* is what we have.

Trouble
Oh trouble move away
I have seen your face
and it’s too much for me today

Some days, though, are hard. Recently our family friend, Mike Glicksohn, passed away suddenly. He’d been fighting cancer for many years, fighting pain, fighting slipping away. And one day a few weeks ago he had a stroke. And that was it. Insert a raised glass of whiskey and a multitude of Internet memorials [ here ]. Back in… 2008, I think, when his cancer had returned, I knew I wasn’t going to see him again. He and his wife live in Toronto, and what with the yarn store I hardly had time to travel – let alone had the money. So I told myself then, that if/when Mike died, I wasn’t allowed to beat myself up over not seeing him. I was allowed to grieve, but I wasn’t allowed to tell myself I was a horrible, unloving person for not seeing him again.

Trouble
Oh trouble can’t you see
You have made me a wreck
Now won’t you leave me in my misery

But let me tell you… over the last few weeks? That’s been a really, really fine line. Letting myself grieve for the loss of him without berating myself for never traveling up to see him? That’s a very difficult task. At the same time that I’m looking at old photos, and thanking Mike for being so patient with me as a pestering child, for talking to me as if I were an adult, for giving me such a love of jigsaw puzzles (for years, for Christmas, we would exchange puzzles as gifts by taking all the pieces out of the box, bagging them up, and mailing them to each other without a picture of what the puzzle was supposed to be – IN YOUR FACE, 1000 PIECE DOUBLE-SIDED CIRCULAR JIGSAW PUZZLE!!!1!)… at the same time that I’m celebrating him, there’s a voice inside me saying that if I’d really loved him, I would have gone to see him one more time.

I’ve seen your eyes
and I can see death’s disguise
Hangin’ on me
Hangin’ on me

And yet… I got an email from him about a month before he died. Nothing much, really just a mass email to say sorry about not sending a Christmas card, he’d been ill, money was tight for him and Susan… and I emailed back right away. I told him that I loved him, and I was so sorry for being a horrible correspondent, but that I thought of him often and wished him strength and peace of mind and spirit. And that was the last thing I said to him. Or rather, wrote to him. It was over email, not even on the telephone, and certainly not in person… but the last thing I said to him were words of love, and isn’t that what anyone wants their last conversation with someone to be? Not words of anger or frustration, but words of kindness?

I’m beat, I’m torn
Shattered and tossed and worn
Too shocking to see
Too shocking to see

So I really shouldn’t give myself a bunch of shit about not going to Toronto some time in the last three years. I told myself I wasn’t allowed to beat myself up, so really, I shouldn’t. Not that telling myself “I shouldn’t” is going to stop me, mind you — would it stop any of you? But I should be as gentle to myself as I’d be to a friend.

Trouble
Oh trouble move from me
I have paid my debt
Now won’t you leave me in my misery

I have paid my debt, trouble. I have beaten myself up, for this and other things not said to other people. Every time someone I love dies, I think about the things they left undone and I consider where I am, what I’m doing, and what I might leave undone were I to leave the party. I vow to go the places I want to go, do the things I want to do, and then… then I fall into my complacent workaholic state, where I just putter and craft things and think about traveling to Alaska and I never do it. If I’m hit by a bus tomorrow I want one of you to go to Alaska for me, OK? Stay with Tim’s cousin, Linda. She has a great house.

Trouble
Oh trouble please be kind
I don’t want no fight
And I haven’t got a lot of time

I don’t have a lot of time. Well, I have as much time as I have, I have a lifetime. But I don’t have time to sit around here feeling sorry for myself; I need to go out and love some more.

Let me say first that nobody (that I know of) has been diagnosed with cancer, has been hit by a bus, had a horrible miscarriage, or any other such badness.

But for those of you who are regulars at our yarn store, or have been cheering from the sidelines, we have some news about some changes. I will wait while you go read that, if you want. doo dee dooo….. la la la la la…. doo dee doo…. back yet? Never left? Want me to just tell you in a nutshell, or recap if you just read it and your mind has gone blank? Hanks Yarn and Fiber is changing to a new business model that involves being online and no longer having a bricks-and-mortar storefront.

I have so much I want to say.

This is hard. The first few weeks I expect to be walking around the house trying to talk to Sharon, maybe even shouting out to her like she might be in the other room. It’ll be like when you can’t remember where you put your coffee cup, and you walk around with a sense of loss and irritation at yourself. The thought that I won’t see Nugget taking her brave steps across the floor of the yarn shop is like a knife in my heart; so is the thought of not seeing Little K push the little red rocking chair around. I love those kids SO!HARD! And that’s crazy, because y’all know what a bitter and black place my heart is. It’ll be hard because I feel like a failure. I feel like I am stupid and useless and have wasted the last three years on something that didn’t work.

This is easy. I’m going to get to do a part of the job I love – dyeing yarn – all the time. Maybe even in my PJs. I am reassured by my loving family that I am not a failure; that if anything, the economy has failed me. That Ginger and Sharon and I were strong and amazing for moving forward with our dreams, and if I was brave enough to do that three years ago I am surely just as brave now. This is not a failure. This is a re-imagining of our dream, set to fit the horrible status of the US economy. We won’t have the enormous rent hanging over our heads like a guillotine, and that will make things easier for us. Also, I can find a part-time job (file this under “maybe easy, maybe hard”) and get a paycheck, thus ensuring that our new kittens will not suddenly be made homeless.

This is the worst thing ever in the history of worst things. I am a failure. I should be put in front of a firing squad. Wait – actually? Yeah. Smack me. My father dying was worse than this. If I got through that I can get through this. We are given burdens in this life; also shoulders.

This is ultimately going to be OK. We are going to be able to reach heights with our lines of things online that we just couldn’t do in a shop setting, because of all the overhead. And the people who love us, love hanging out with us – that won’t stop. My time is easily bought for cold beer, cute pets, Satchel’s, Sweet Dreams, and Yum Cupcakery. And also easily bought just for being able to hang out with you. So… call me! After July 1st, my dance card is pretty fucking free!

And you know what? A lot of the reason I haven’t been blogging about personal things is that I’ve wanted to share my fears with you for such a long time. And I couldn’t. We thought we might save the storefront. We though we might be able to swing it; maybe move, maybe downsize… but we didn’t know. And I’ve been so confused and worried and wanting to talk to you, but … didn’t want to start rumors about the yarn shop that would make people think we’ve closed and thus make things worse. So it’s been easier to not say anything at all, rather than try to be fluffy. I’m looking forward to blogging more, to letting more of my heart out on these pages.

I hope you’ll stick around – both here, and on our online shop. I hope you’ll still like me. Because I love you – HARD!

I don’t really remember the first person I lost.

I think it was either Aunt Nellie or Aunt Mildred, gone when I was young. Less than 10, I think. Too young to really get what death meant, or how heavy it could hit you.

Next would probably be my grandfather, my mother’s father. I was a bit older then… 12? 13? But since I didn’t know him very well, it didn’t hurt me as much as it hurt my mother.

The first one that I really started to get the finality of was my father’s father. I remember the song we rehearsed, as a family, to sing at his funeral. And how my grandmother looked, weeping, in her wheelchair, as we sang it. But since he and I were never close – in fact, I was a bit afraid of him – I didn’t feel the loss that others in my family did.

No, the first one that really made me understand, really made me ache, was when I was 20 and my father’s mother died. I don’t know if it was because we were so close, or because I was finally old enough to get it…? But the loss of her was something that I still carry around and, and still occasionally get surprised by the weight of the loss.

I’ve lost friends, too. When I was 18, in art school, a cop friend of ours shot himself in the head while at a party. Some party, eh? To this day, I can’t watch movies where people get shot in the head without thinking, “it’s not a neat little hole like that, you know. It really goes everywhere.”  Three or four years later I lost another friend to cancer.

For all that losing my paternal grandmother shook me, it didn’t even begin to prepare me for what losing my father was like.

Now, similar to the game of “which limb from the big pine tree is going to fall next” game, I find myself wondering who is going to be next. Odds would say the eldest, wouldn’t it?

Well, you’d think so. But then a co-worker six years younger than I am gets struck by lightning in the field one day, and you just can’t be too sure of those odds.

An old family friend – and by that I mean someone who has known me since I was about four years old, not that he’s old – has recently been diagnosed with two kinds of cancer. And I find myself like Dorothy, faced by the Wicked Witch of the West. She’s telling me that the last to go shall see the first three go before her—only it’s not three, it’s an unknown number. It could be three. But it could be thirty. It’s a crapshoot. It’s all a crapshoot; whatever we get is what we get and those of us that are left behind have to keep the memory of our loved ones alive in our hearts so that they never truly die and lie forgotten. And I think of what my friend Neil wrote once; “you get what everyone gets. You get a lifetime.”

And I try to make the best of mine, and to see the best in yours.