Begin Again

Lessons from knitting

Photo by Margarida Afonso on Unsplash

I sailed through the hospital doors wearing a pencil skirt and three-inch high heels, just 21 years old, all dressed up and packing what I believed were essential to the fight ahead: a tube of Necco wafers and the project—ten skeins of deep blue wool, two long wooden sticks and a cabled sweater pattern. Never mind that I had never actually knit. I needed to look good and hold something in my hands besides heartbreak.

My shoes slid to a halt in the doorway of her room. Under a small mountain of white blankets my mother whispered, “Take those damn shoes off, I could hear you a mile away.”

I kicked them under a chair and took her hand. We had a few days to wait for the tumor diagnosis.

Knitting had always looked like a slow way to nowhere. But what to do with my hands in the endless hours ahead? A week before I had asked my cousin to teach me, my voice wobbling. “Forget I said this is an old lady sport. I need something to do.”

She looked at me sideways. “In seven days?”

The basics seemed straightforward; knit into the front, purl into the back, keeping the flat and bumpy stitches hidden. I made copious notes. Then I ran through a local yarn store, grabbed a pattern, wool, and the needles.

As the hospital quieted down for the night, I pulled a metal chair to the side of the bed and balanced the instructions on my knees. I pulled the wrapper off the new needles and froze. I was immediately lost; cast on? decrease? turn cable? I searched my notes for clues. My mother’s breath deepened into sleep.

I flipped the pages back and forth, trying to decipher the symbols. Four decades before cellphones, Google, or YouTube for on-demand problem solving I was on my own, with the slimmest of knowledge, my only contact with the world a pay phone down the hall. The needles slipped this way then that, the yarn ball jumping around in my lap as I clumsily wrestled each loop on and off the needle. Then three stitches fell off and disappeared. I swore. My mother opened her eyes.

I knew she had knit once. Several hats and even a Nordic sweater she had made my father during their college courtship days. I wondered if he had kept the hats after their divorce. I wish I had taken them.

“Hold your hands steady!” she croaked, her throat raw from the breathing tube. “Sit up. Oh no, there goes another one!” I had envisioned myself as Florence Nightingale, quietly knitting in the corner, the peaceful rhythmic click of the needles relaxing my patient, but the mess I was making turned out to be much more diverting.

When the next nurse finally pushed sleeping meds into my mother’s veins, the first ball of yarn had had enough. It jumped off my lap and slow-motion rolled under her bed. I dropped to my knees and crawled my arm under the bed frame. When I stood brandishing a dust-covered ball of yarn I had holes in the knees of my stockings. My mother took one look at me and burst out laughing, wincing as the jiggling pulled on her incisions. Unwittingly, I had also packed comic relief.

“I know it will be beautiful. Eventually.” Her voice softened as the drugs pulled her under. I tucked the blankets around her and moved to the hallway, leaving the door slightly ajar to keep her in my sight.

Back in 1980, when security was nonexistent and COVID inconceivable, family could stay the night. I whittled the time away cross-legged, back against the wall, a humming florescent light overhead. Regretted my outfit but leaned into my night vigil: sucked the Necco wafers one-by-one, chocolate first, refreshed my coffee from a machine down the hall, tip-toed into her room every hour to pushed the hair from her forehead and stare at her white face. After every break I grasped the needles again and kept going.

At about 1 a.m., sleep-deprived and staring at my hands in despair, a pair of white laced shoes stopped in front of me. Hands reached down, unraveled a knot in the yarn, then took the needles and picked up a dropped stitch. I looked up and smiled at a young nurse with sparkly earrings. “Looks good!” she said. “Hold your elbows closer,;it will take the strain off your wrists.” She headed back down the hall.

One stitch grew into inches of knitting. I concentrated: in and out, in and out. Cried about my mom. Laughed at my mess. Dozed using the skeins as my pillow.

By dawn my project was knotted and curled in my lap like a small navy dog in need of the emergency room. I fished a dime out of my purse, slipped on the abandoned shoes, and headed to the payphone.

“Well,” my cousin said evenly, “here is the most important thing you need to learn.” As she talked me through, I ripped the entire project out row by row and rewound the yarn, casting on for a smaller size. When my mother woke up, I procured tiny cups of vanilla pudding which we ate off elfin plastic spoons. She fingered the soft wool. Her blue eyes glittered.

That night I joined two communities for the rest of my life: children who lose a mother too soon and people who knit. I put my head down on the bed and she rested her hand on my hair. She talked about her travel plans. I knew despite the results we would fight to the end.

Lessons to begin again, no matter how hard.

Alexandra Dane writes about what lies deep in the marrow: life, disease, memory and hope—always hope. Her work explores her mother’s cancer and her own: Cake is published in the 2026 food anthology If Memory Serves. A finalist for the 2025 Swamp Pink Prize in Nonfiction, winner of the Annie Dillard Creative Nonfiction award from The Bellingham Review, Alexandra Dane is published in The Sonora Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, River Teeth and San Fedele Press’s American Writers Review, among others. The tiny big things happen at www.alexandradanewrites.com and her knitting can be seen on Instagram at @adaneknits.