this article appeared in the akron beacon journal on thanksgiving day. more proof that knitting can save the world.
Warmth for winter
Knit gifts comfort her family
By Kim Hone-McMahan
Beacon Journal staff writer
Published on Thursday, Nov 27, 2008
A single fiber of wool is a fragile thing. But when many of them are lovingly spun together and shaped into yarn, they can make extraordinary creations. Elizabeth McCaslin knew that.
Chris Spitzer and Elizabeth became friends about eight years ago because of their shared passion. Chris raises the rarest form of sheep in the United States. As exotic wood is to a woodcarver, so is the fleece of these sheep to fiber artists. Gifted at spinning yarn, Elizabeth longed to use this wool for a line that would appeal to artists and bought some of the unusual sheep from Chris.
Those who create fiber masterpieces routinely keep in touch with each other. Sometimes they share information about spinning, or have a lamb to sell. There are even special groups for specific breeds of sheep. Both Elizabeth and Chris belonged to one such organization. And in June, Elizabeth sent a message to fellow members.
The shepherdess and mother of three young children explained that she had a fast-growing, inoperable tumor in her neck, a side effect of intense radiation more than a decade earlier to treat Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
And she asked for their prayers and suggestions on matters involving her sheep.
The message saddened Chris, who wondered whether there was something she could do to help.
”You know, there is something. . . . I’ve got 100 pounds of roving [wool harvested from the sheep] just back from the processor. I’d promised myself to make sweaters for the kids for this winter,” Elizabeth wrote in an e-mail in September. ”I’ve been spinning, but lately it’s slowed to a crawl and I just don’t think the sweaters are going to happen.
”Do you know of some women who could help me spin and knit my roving into some sweaters for my family? That would be the perfect going-away gift.”
So Chris wrote to members of her guild, men and women who spin and weave, to tell them of Elizabeth’s plight, and included an excerpt from the dying mother’s e-mail:
”The thing that makes it extra hard is I can’t talk now. Not a word.” The tumor was crushing her trachea.
She described 3-year-old Liam crying for his mommy, though she was rocking him in her arms. ”He was sleepy and didn’t know it was me and kept crying,” she said. ”It’s so sad.”
Knowing that people would rush to volunteer, Chris, who lives in Bath Township, went to Elizabeth’s home in Hartville to pick up the roving.
They sat on the floor together. Unable to speak, Elizabeth, 40, a brilliant woman who was class valedictorian in 1986 at Independence High School and graduated summa cum laude in 1990 from Kent State University, scribbled notes to her visitor.
”Everything is falling apart now. I have no energy and I’m in lots of pain,” she confessed.
On a huge piece of paper, she told Chris that the wool for 5-year-old Aryn Rose’s sweater was from the little girl’s favorite sheep, named Chocolate. That Liam’s sweater should be tan, white and blue. And that she and 8-year-old Cade had already begun spinning for his sweater, with wool from a sheep her son calls Cow.
The 100 pounds of wool was more than needed to knit the sweaters, so Chris left half behind, to be given to the children as an inheritance.
Getting up to leave, Chris sensed that Elizabeth was trying to tell her something else. When death is near, sometimes it’s not our voices that speak, but our souls.
”No,” Chris told her, rubbing her back. ”This is not too much to ask.”
Not a moment to waste
Realizing that time for Elizabeth was quickly running out, 35 members of guilds from Bath to Ashland volunteered to spin the wool. Another group, most of whom didn’t know Elizabeth, helped ply it — taking two strands and joining them together to make the final yarn. The sheep, known as CVM (California Variegated Mutant), are prized for their soft wool in a palette of natural colors and patterns.
The next day, Oct. 13, Chris, who had spent hours washing the yarn, planned to visit Elizabeth in the hospice at the Justin T. Rogers Care Center in Copley Township. She would take the yarn with her.
As Chris was finishing her work, Elizabeth’s family, including her children, was holding an emotional vigil as they watched her labored breathing. Her husband, Shaun, longed to sing songs to her that had been part of the couple’s crusade to defeat cancer. But with company present, he felt shy. Instead, he began humming.
Elizabeth squeezed his hand. The sign encouraged him to ask the others to sing aloud. Sobbing, they sang songs of God’s promise of resurrection and paradise.
When they finished, Shaun asked to be alone with his wife.
He thanked her for giving him three beautiful children, for her creativity, faithfulness, loyalty, goodness and honesty. And, if she could pray silently, he told her to ask God to give him the strength to be a good father, to give the children happiness and the opportunity to fulfill their dreams.
On Oct. 13, Chris put the yarn in her Chevrolet truck and drove to the center. She was excited to show her friend the beautiful wool. But when she went inside, a nurse told her that Elizabeth had died three hours earlier.
Yarns of love
It can take up to five months to knit a sweater, but Chris and the others who helped were determined to get them done before Elizabeth’s calling hours that Friday. And it wouldn’t be right, they reasoned, to leave Shaun out, so they had to make him a sweater, too.
Members of a local guild began knitting, keeping up a frantic pace — day and night — until the sweaters were finished.
Jan Burt of Bath, a mother of nine children who was helping with the project, knows a thing or two about kids and suggested that Elizabeth’s youngsters also needed pillows — ”If there’s one thing I know, their arms ache to hold something when they have a void.”
On Friday, one hour before the private family viewing, Chris pulled into the driveway of the McCaslins’ 18-acre farm.
Just inside the front door, the children were jumping up and down with excitement. In an instant, the sweaters were over their heads.
The oldest, Cade, ran upstairs and returned wearing a stocking cap Elizabeth had knitted for him. He threw a scarf to Chris so that she could get a better look at his mother’s handiwork. Then he picked up the pillow made especially for him.
”It was like sorrow had temporarily left,” said Chris, remembering Cade clutching the pillow to his chest. ”And, at least for a moment, he was again wrapped in his mommy’s love.”
A precious sign
The following day, as Shaun and the children were getting ready for the funeral, one of the family’s dogs was outside, barking. Aryn Rose told her daddy he needed to check on the pooch.
As he opened the door of the farmhouse, he glanced toward the nearby pond. On the bank, a newborn lamb was struggling to stand.
The scene seemed impossible to Shaun. Generally, Elizabeth’s ewes had given birth either in the summer or winter, not in October. Yet how fitting, he thought, that a lamb would be born on this day.
”It seemed like a message to me and my family that even though this was the day we would bury my wife and their mother, life will go on — and God will bless us.”
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