Sewing Safety

I am sitting in my one room basement apartment. It is dark, even though it is daytime. I’m in a lot of pain from cramps, crying while I watch a tv show but I’m not really paying attention. I can’t remember a time I have felt despair like this. If I could stop existing in this moment I would.

This morning at six AM I drove my partner Chris to the hospital for the fourth time. Or maybe it was the fifth. It is May of 2020 and he has Covid. He has been sick since mid-March, when the lockdown started. Through this whole time he has been in a state of complete and abject terror. His lungs hurt, he has a fever all the time his heart hurts and he tells me it feels like it is beating out of his chest when he tries to sleep. He has infections throughout his body. I have Covid too but my symptoms are milder. He keeps telling me that he thinks he is going to die.

“You’re not going to die,” I say over and over. My denial is absolute and irrational. It cannot happen. I will not allow it to be a possibility. If I deny the danger he is in, maybe it won’t be so terrible.

I take him to the hospital and they send him home. “You have pneumonia. Don’t come back unless you feel like you’re dying.” He does, but he can still breathe so we stay home. He gets an infection in his eyes and they give him antibiotics that give him nerve pain. They give him a different antibiotic. He gets an EKG and they tell him he has swelling around his heart. He has abdominal pain and they find polyps on his gallbladder that weren’t there before.

Later he develops a six inch blood clot in his leg and has to go on blood thinners.

Before all this he was a healthy 33 year old who did construction and worked out five times a week. Now he sleeps and shakes and we take him to the hospital.

I am barely thinking. I am filled with irrational rage at my own helplessness and overwhelming fear. To me, fear is weakness. Death is creeping at our door and I just want to be able to blot it out. Put my head down and pretend it’s not happening.

I just want peace. Any peace. I just want it all to stop.

I start sewing masks.

I sew professionally so it’s an easy thing for me to do. Everyone in Canada is saying don’t wear masks. But all my partner does is research Covid. He is on Redit boards for Covid sufferers, he reads original research papers. He knows the virus is spread by aerosols long before the W.H.O or our government admits it. The local hospital, the one that keeps sending him home with nothing, the one that denied us Covid tests when we first fell sick, is asking for masks.

I get quilting cotton shipped to me from a nearby shop. Normally I would sew upstairs in my mom’s part of the house but I can’t go upstairs because I can’t risk infecting her. We moved into this basement apartment in 2017 to save money. But one thing went wrong, and another, and we have been trapped here for what feels like forever. Now, as lockdown stretches on, as it becomes clear that Chris will not be able to go back to work any time soon, we are truly trapped.

I don’t realize it at the time, but Chris saves my mom’s life. The moment we feel symptoms he insists I not go upstairs to where she lives. If I do, I must wear a dishtowel over my face like a mask. I think he is overreacting, I want to deny the danger, but I still do what he says. I never go upstairs unless it is absolutely necessary, and for a very short amount of time. I stand far away from her and wear a cloth, or eventually a mask that I make, over my mouth and nose. She never gets Covid. She is 72, the age that is considered high risk. If she had gotten Covid from me, she may not have survived.

So I set up my sewing table in our tiny, one room apartment. It fills the space at the end of the bed, my partner sits on the couch. I sew mask after mask after mask. I have paid sewing work I could be doing, but I just sew masks. I sew them to give to the hospital. I sew them to give to local shelters. I sew them and give them to anyone who asks. I sell them to people who can afford to pay. I should be working on my projects but instead I sew masks. I perfect the design, I improve the ties, I eventually figure out how to make them adjustable. I use up linen and silk scraps and old pillow cases and random cotton table cloths. I make over 100 and then I lose track.

By this time it’s mid-May and I am feeling well enough to start sewing my other projects again.

I sew a medieval reproduction jacket in silk brocade for a client who has been waiting almost a year.

I make mask linings with the silk scraps.

Normally I make jewellery. But my jewellery bench is at a friends house on the other side of town and we are locked down so I can’t go there. Making jewellery makes me feel sane and safe but I can’t do it. So I sew masks.

I know the masks help keep people safe. I know they will be used. Even if they aren’t perfect I know they are so important.

When I am sewing I am putting the world back together. When I am making masks I know I am reaching past myself. I am locked in my dark basement with my sick partner who I can’t really help, who thinks he is dying. The only way I can touch the world is through these masks.

Crafting has always been my safe place. When I make things I can blot out the world. As a teenager, fighting an endless battle with my own mental health I would watch Firefly over and over and make chainmail jewellery. No matter how much my brain hurt, no matter how much I wanted to hurt myself, I could find a way through it by crafting. As long as I could craft I could make the world, and myself a little bit more whole.

This year I realized that crafting is how I show love. I make people things when I care about them. I make people things so they will think of me and be happy when they wear them, and know that I care about them. I also realized it’s how I show love to myself

When I make something beautiful for myself I am telling myself that I am worthy of love, even when I don’t feel like it. I am using my hands to build a world that is safe and beautiful for those around me, and for me as well. This may not sound like a revelation, but the realization put my whole life into focus. Loving myself was not easy or straightforward, I have always looked to others to define my self worth. Creating things for the people around me was easy. But when I realized that creating things for me was a quiet message to myself, that I was of value, things fell into place.

When I was 16 I dreamed that I could look into my hands and focus and whatever I imagined would become a reality. I have worked endlessly to make that true. I taught myself to sew, I learned to make chainmail, then I learned to make jewellery. It was all a way of making myself whole, of building and rebuilding structures to keep my mind quiet and my hands happy. To keep myself safe, and make myself feel valued.

When Chris was sick, I couldn’t keep him safe. I couldn’t keep the people dying from Covid safe. But I could make masks. I could keep my little portion of the world a little safer, showing my love to my community with the work of my hands. Holding this nightmareish, life-destroying disease at bay, just a little.

At the beginning of the lockdown I started embroidering a medieval hood I wear for historical re-enactments. I decided I would embroider little silly characters from medieval manuscripts onto the edge of the hood. It was an ambitious project, and I rarely had the energy to focus on it. The first set of figures was a huge snail fighting a tiny knight. It took ages and then I left it for a month. Next, I did a bunny with an axe fighting a bishop with a ridiculous beard and then left it again for months.

Things started to get better.

Chris stopped getting infections. His heart stopped hurting so often.

He was on blood thinners that gave him headaches. Even so we went camping with our friends in Algonquin. It was hard but it was still good. He wasn’t as strong as he’d been. He didn’t have as much energy but he could still participate. In the evenings he would lie on the ground on a sheepskin with his leg up against a tree to try to drain the blood from the clot in his leg. Still, he was ok. He wasn’t as afraid of dying. Things almost felt normal.

People still order masks from time to time. I modified the design to include filters and made improvements to the nose wires so they would be more durable. Making a mask or two has become a fun way to relax between harder sewing projects. Now they are something small and satisfying that I can complete in half an hour; no longer a desperate way to cling to sanity.

I pick up the embroidered hood from time to time. It’s about half done. It’s very fun finding bunnies in medieval manuscripts fighting each other with spears. It takes a long time to do each figure but it’s so satisfying when I complete one.

When I work on it, I think about what it will be like when it is safe to meet in person and get back to medieval re-enactments again. My friends will look closely at all the little bunnies and snails and knights going around the edge of the hood and they will laugh at how silly it is.

And we will hug each other without fear. And I will be happy.